self recovery of failed RAID10. Can I clone the drives to attempt myself before I make use of a professional?

Question

just yesterday I was doing some BIOS work on my computer, and accidentally loaded a saved configuration from my BIOS that changed the SATA mode from RAID->AHCI.

I have a RAID10(0+1) composed of 4x3TB drives managed by the intel onboard controller, which promptly failed after the sata mode changed. two disks fell out of the raid, and are now in a non-member configuration. As I understand it, nothing has physically failed, just the software RAID has messed up the metadata.

I found a gentleman who experienced the exact same issue that I did, and has recovered all of his files without issue (link1, link2)

In the case that my self recovery fails, prior to doing so, can I take each drive of the raid and individually clone it to a 3TB drive, then attempt to restore the raid from the 4 duplicate drives I made? this theoretically would preserve the original drives so if I mess anything up, I would be able to take it to a professional no problem.

My question is, is it possible to clone the drives and then restore the RAID from the duplicate drives? If so, what steps should I take to clone the drives safely without any risk? Thanks!

Answer 1

I've done something similar with R-Tools. (Beware that there are imposter sites!) I imaged each of the 8 drives of the Raid-5 array, it took a lot of playing around to find the striping configuration but I finally got it--and it then read the disks fine. (I had no array damage, I had a failed controller.)

Note that the real version of R-Tools has a demo mode that does everything but save files over 64k. Perfect for finding out of it will do the job before you spend money on it.

Note that it doesn't write to the source drives at all, you don't need images in order to find out if it will work. Obviously you'll need either images or something to write the recovered data to.