Is it possible to clone the individual disks of a hardware RAID to get a copy of the contained array?
I have an Adaptec RAID controller. I put it offline, attached the RAID member HDDs to a regular SATA port and tried to clone the disks to some other disks using G4L using the RAW mode. It looked like the clone process did work based on the amount of data copied. But after I used the cloned disks on the Adaptec RAID controller, it did not find any arrays but did detect the disks.
I wonder if it is even possible to clone the disk or if there is some data that has to be copied in another way?
Update: As there where some questions on the how and why:
- the array in question is causing problems and I figured it would be the safest way to clone the disks and work with the copy instead of the original disks.
- the array did not fit on one disk (to clone to) so I figured it would be the way to go
- I don't have enough NAS storage available to clone the array to
- I tried to clone to larger disks as the original model is no longer available (no longer sold) and I'm out of replacements
- I did power down the system before (and between) copying/switching the disks to avoid hotswap detection issues and confusing the controller and having a consistent state between the disks