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By the title of this I hope it's obvious that I'm trying to console myself with humor after the idiotic mistake I made last night.

And I'm hoping that someone out might be able to verify a few things before I really DO in-fact lose over 100TB of irreplaceable data.

Where to start...my main storage is managed by an 1882IX-12 w/ 8x12TB Hitachi's broken up into three Virtual Volumes:

ARC_01 (APFS), ARC_02 (NTFS) and MINI_ARC (NTFS)

Everything was functional and fine. Humming along...and then the 9211-8I walks into the bar.

I'm currently in the middle of building some custom Apple CMPs for a client, one of which we chose a 9211 to drive 2x1TB 970 SSDs along with 3x4TB Hitachi's. The LSI was flashed to IT mode and successfully works within MacOS, running RAID 0 with an APFS volume.

In order to achieve this we hang the LSI and the drives off my main system and use MEGARAID to configure the arrays. No issue there.

(STUPID IDEAS START HERE)

I had already been up for 36 hours trying to get these CMPs done for my client and had far too much JOLT in my system and in a moment of shear stupidity I accidentally plugged in 3x 12TB drives from my ARECA array into the LSI.

Wait for it....wait for it...

And then did something even MORE STUPID (I was on auto-pilot) and when I opened up MEGARAID to build the 3x4TB array for the CMP, I saw 3x12TB drives and as if the devil himself moved my hand I clicked "OK" and created a new virtual volume with them on the LSI.

WHAT AN IDIOT..

So naturally all my virtual volumes on my ARECA are now gone after rebooting, I walked outside at 4am cursed the Gods, definately, maybe cried a little and then decided to shut it down for the night.

Here is what I have working in my favor though -- I think...

When creating the virtual volume with the 3x12TBs I DID NOT initialize it. So no data wipe occurred. But I can't access anything because all three VV's are broken/gone.

I've been reading this morning some and it looks I should be able to create the virtual volumes within MRAID (ARECA CONFIG) being careful to NOT re-initialize them and bring them back online.

I am familiar with building RAIDS and using the HTTP Daemons, but not sure enough of myself to start clicking buttons without some/any guidance.

Can anyone out there possibly comment and share some insight?

PLEASE GOD, I HOPE SO.

Jason Paul Michaels
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  • I can’t say for sure on your best path. Two things I do know. I’m going to forego saying that “irreplaceable” data can be restored from your most recent backup - oh wait I did. If this is “irreplaceable” data then first clone the three disks in question byte by byte to make sure you have something to undo future endeavors on. Next, what you’re talking about here is metadata. You wiped metadata and the data is still there. However, this is an extremely complex subject and if you can use regular tools, special tools, or a plain old hex editor to rebuild the metadata is beyond what I can answer. – Appleoddity Mar 11 '22 at 22:39
  • Someone with enough knowledge and skill could likely use a hex editor and rebuild the RAID metadata on the 3 drives by comparing it to the other 9 drives. Then voila, the RAID controller will see a complete RAID array again. The raid metadata is in the first sector or two if memory serves me right. – Appleoddity Mar 11 '22 at 22:42
  • @Appleoddity I am willing to pay someone for their time or make a donation on behalf to the board. Is that person you? – Jason Paul Michaels Mar 13 '22 at 03:06

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