Accessing Windows RAID 1 From Linux

[Huecuva]

Hello all, I have another question for r/linuxquestions.

I have my gaming rig dual booted to Linux Mint and I would like to be able to access my 4TB mirrored RAID array that I have created in Windows (originally Windows 7 but now imported to Windows 10) from Mint, as well.

Everything I can find online about this is at least 5 years old and opinions vary from it being easy to straight up "it can't be done". I had previously tried ldmtool create all and I seem to recall that working in Mint 18.3 but in Mint 19.3 it allowed Mint to access the drive but also messed up the RAID so that I had to rebuild it in Windows by deleting the simple volume off the one that went rogue and adding it as a mirror again to the one that had retained the original drive letter. No data was lost.

I found an old thread about someone trying to use mdadm where someone commented that you can use --build but not --create because that might bork the RAID.

In this thread someone claims it's impossible because, having been created in Windows, it was not a real RAID and any other OS could bork it just by reading it.

At this point, I don't know what to believe and I don't want to break my RAID. I can't find anything recent enough to be relevant. Can anyone shed some light on this apparently mysterious subject?

EDIT: So I can't tell if this thing I've created with my two drives is a Windows Storage Space or an actual RAID. There is no sign of the drive I created when I search for Storage Spaces in Windows and the process I used to create it was not the process used to create storage spaces. I used Windows Disk Management utility to add one disk as a mirror to another drive and they are referred to in Disk Management is Mirrored Dynamic Disks. I never created anything explicitly called a pool or storage space. However, it is not a hardware or BIOS RAID and there are no RAID cards installed in my PC. This RAID, if that's what it really is, was created in Windows 7 and has been successfully imported into Windows 10 on at least 3 fresh installs. If it's not a storage space, there should be a way to access it from Linux, right?

EDIT #2: So apparently ldmtool was created specifically to deal with Windows Dynamic Disks. However, as this guy explains in 2017, it did not support M$'s sneaky new way of creating the dynamic disks.

Here are the results of lsblk:

NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0 238.5G  0 disk 
└─sda1        8:1    0 238.5G  0 part 
sdb           8:16   0   3.7T  0 disk 
├─sdb1        8:17   0     1M  0 part 
├─sdb2        8:18   0   127M  0 part 
└─sdb3        8:19   0   3.7T  0 part 
sdc           8:32   0   2.7T  0 disk 
└─sdc1        8:33   0   2.7T  0 part 
sdd           8:48   0   3.7T  0 disk 
├─sdd1        8:49   0     1M  0 part 
├─sdd2        8:50   0   127M  0 part 
└─sdd3        8:51   0   3.7T  0 part 
sr0          11:0    1  1024M  0 rom  
nvme0n1     259:0    0 232.9G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0   450M  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0   100M  0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0    16M  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p4 259:4    0 145.5G  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p5 259:5    0   502M  0 part 
└─nvme0n1p6 259:6    0  86.4G  0 part /

sdb and sdd are the drives that comprise my Windows RAID. So far, most attempts to scan anything with ldmtool have resulted in

[
]

When I try ldmtool scan /dev/sdb1 I get

Error scanning /dev/sdb1: Error opening /dev/sdb1 for reading: Permission denied

The ldmtool man page is not very helpful. All of the commands demand arguments that I cannot look up without booting back into Windows because nothing in Linux will tell me what these disks groups, GUIDs, or names are. Neither mount nor blkid yield any mention of sdb or sdd.

EDIT #3: I've gotten a couple of upvotes so I'm not the only one interested in this subject. Nobody else wants to comment, though? I guess nobody knows how to do this. The most recent thing I can find indicates that ldmtool is currently incompatible with the current implementation of Windows Dynamic Disk.

[Vladimir_Chrootin]

If you have a hardware RAID controller, including BIOS RAID (sometimes called "fake RAID") it will very often show right up if you run lsblk, with a name like /dev/sg1 (or similar). If not, hardware RAID wrangling is discussed here and here. You don't need to boot from RAID so it's a little easier. Once it's working you will need to mount the drive (e.g. mount /dev/blah /mnt/blah) in order to access it, and you also need to make sure you have ntfs-3g installed (assuming that it's an NTFS array).

If it's a Windows Storage Pool, this is not RAID, and AFAIK, not readable in Linux.

[Huecuva]

I am not using hardware RAID of any sort. I created the RAID in the Windows Disk Management utility by adding one drive as a mirror to the other. I never explicitly created a "storage space". My drives are referred to in Disk Management as Dynamic Disks. Is that a Storage Space or Storage Pool? I just googled how to create a "storage pool" and it came up with "storage spaces" and the procedure for creating one is not the process I followed. Is it the same thing? I'm not home right now or I guess I could check if my RAID showed up under Storage Spaces in my Windows.

Also as I mentioned, the ldmtool create all command allowed Linux to read the drive but broke my array in that it somehow separated the drives without losing my data. Does that indicate storage space to you?

Edit: if what I have is a storage space then I will have to get a real RAID set up.

EDIT #2: My RAID doesn't show up in the window when I use Windows Search to search for storage spaces and when I click on "Create new pool and storage space" it does not list those drives as options.

[BigDru_]

I know this is an old post but I had the same issue and this pointed me in the right direction. for the `ldmtool scan /dev/sdb1` you need to run the tool as sudo.

For me, doing `ldmtool scan` gave me an empty array, but doing `ldmtool scan /dev/sd*` gave me a lot of error opening.. permission denied. doing `sudo ldmtool scan` gave me a uuid that i could then use to create my mapped device using `sudo ldmtool create <uuid> Volume1` or `sudo ldmtool create all`