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I'm trying to help out my former employer (I haven't worked there in 8 years); they have an old server that has suddenly gone belly up and it appears that the motherboard is failing and no longer recognizes the Adaptec 2120S SCSI controller no matter which of the two 64bit Pci slots it's plugged into. I got a working spare and tried that but the same thing. About two years ago their DLT backup drive seized and they never replaced it (they've been going through a severe financial crisis) so they have no recent backups and no DLT drive to hookup to another computer to try and restore the data; not to mention that they used a really old version of Arcserve which won't work on any modern OS.

So I believe that the SCSI data drive is in good working order so ideally I'd like to try and read the data off of it. I got my hands on an Adaptec ASC-29320LPE and I installed it into one of my own newer servers and hooked up the hard drive. The controller recognizes it but once I get into the OS I'm asked to format the drive. I'm going on the idea that the SCSI adapter is not properly detecting the geometry of this drive which is why it's asking me to format it. The hard drive is an HP model BD14686225 a 146.8GB 10,000 RPM Wide Ultra 320; I checked the cards options and I'm not sure that I see any way to manually set the geometry and I'm not sure how I would determine what the geometry should be. Does anyone have an idea if that's even possible short of sending it out for data recovery?

I should have included this information (my fault) the drive was not in any kind of raid configuration; it was in fact the only hard drive attached to the SCSI Raid controller. When I first swapped in the Adaptec 2120S and tried switching the cards slot and booted the old server I did manage to get the drive to show back up in the servers OS (Server 2003) but the system gave some kind of error and rebooted before I could backup everything. And yes when the system that I have it attached to boots up and I log in and check disk manager it asks to initialize the drive. After this didn't work I also found an Adaptec 2940UW which I believe is a compatible raid card and I have an old XP system that I haven't recycled yet (I keep it for some legacy stuff but almost never use it) and I installed the drivers and attached the drive and it seems like the same problem. (asks to initialize the drive) Maybe there actually is something wrong with the drive itself even though I briefly had it working.

NormAtHome
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    Being this isn’t the 90s, I think geometry is probably not a problem. Is the size of the drive properly recognized? Does the OS ask you to “initialize” the drive? It seems like the drive was probably in a non-standard configuration on the old system. Potentially in some type of degraded RAID mode or something. Have you checked if the new SCSI controller recognizes a RAID configuration on the drive at all? It’s possible it’s just not compatible. I would first get a full clone of the drive to a modern drive, then work with the clone to see if a hex editor or partition / data recovery tool helps. – Appleoddity Sep 08 '18 at 05:04
  • I think @Appleoddity is right as the 2120S adapter is a RAID card and the 29320LPE is a plain SCSI adapter. So you need a second Adaptec RAID controller to access the drive. Not sure if the latest adapters are compatible... – Thomas Sep 08 '18 at 06:20
  • See edits at the bottom: This hard drive was the only hard drive attached to the Adaptec 2120S and it was not in any kind of Raid array. – NormAtHome Sep 08 '18 at 12:36
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    Using the 29320LPE (an HBA), you should have direct access to the disk... I'd wager that the disk has some metadata at the front to identify it to the 2120S RAID controller... Get an image of the disk (or first ~100MB if you don't have space for it all - I'd use `dd`... though not sure what to use on Windows), then try [`binwalk`](https://github.com/ReFirmLabs/binwalk) - you'll probably find the MBR close to the front. At that point you can probably take data from the front of the MBR to the end of the disk/image and lay it directly onto a new disk. – Attie Sep 08 '18 at 13:10
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    I think @Attie hit it on the head. The drive was not in a standard configuration. There is metadata at the beginning of the drive. His solution is a novel approach, that sounds like it could be effective. Otherwise get a more comparable RAID controller from Adaptec and try it. – Appleoddity Sep 08 '18 at 13:19
  • I always find myself all nervous around "_RAID controllers_" in this kind of situation... writing anything to the disk is likely fatal - especially given their situation. I'd recommend steering clear of RAID, and using an HBA (like you have). Get a full image ASAP... If you're comfortable with Linux, then this might be an easier exercise. – Attie Sep 08 '18 at 13:24
  • You can determine if there is something wrong with the drive by doing a surface scan on it. If it’s clean, or mostly clean (just a few bad sectors) then it should be fine for recovering most of the data. You first have to clone this drive which will also tell you if it has issues, then work on the clone to determine what is wrong and recover the data. In this case I think it’s because the drive has a special configuration on it only being recognized by the old adapter. Why can’t you plug in the adaptec card to a different computer if you think the motherboard is acting up? – Appleoddity Sep 08 '18 at 13:25
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    Yeah, drop it in a Linux box; the dmraid driver should be able to decode the RAID header and give you a readable disk device, something like `/dev/mapper/ddf_something`. You can then copy the drive to modern media. Be sure you terminated your SCSI bus. – Michael Hampton Sep 08 '18 at 13:32
  • I'll see what I can do; the problem is that any Raid controller more compatible with the 2120S has no drivers for modern Windows / Server OS's. I have the cable from the original box which does have a proper SCSI terminator. – NormAtHome Sep 08 '18 at 16:01
  • In response to Appleoddity's comment: The Adaptec 2120S is a Pci 64 Bit card and only server class motherboards of that era had those type slots. I'd have to buy an old but working motherboard from that era off of eBay and I looked at that but the only reasonable board which is $32 also needs heatsinks (comes with 2 CPU's but I can take one off) and ram which would be an additional cost. That would probably be less than data recovery so I'm not ruling that out as an option at this point. – NormAtHome Sep 08 '18 at 16:23
  • Sorry, my last comment got cut off: In response to Michael Hampton, I'm afraid my expertise is primarily with Windows and I did at one time (in the 90's) have a passing knowledge of Linux but most business in my area use Windows and when I got married I didn't have time for it anymore. So I'm not sure that I have the knowledge to setup a new Linux machine (on a regular SATA hard drive) and get this drive mounted and then copy the data to a USB hard drive. If I make a mistake and do something that can't be undone then I'm responsible for it. – NormAtHome Sep 08 '18 at 17:02

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