The procedures below are for hardware RAID. See "Hardware RAID" in Chapter 13.

The reconstruction consists of the following steps:

• Optionally back up the component disks.
• Reconfigure the component disks as stand-alone disks.
• Locate a destination folder for recovery.
• Determine the RAID settings.
• Reconstruct the RAID and recover data to the destination folder.

Back Up the Component Disks

You must weigh the safety of backing up the disks against the additional time and disk space resources. If a disk fails, the disk image file created from the disk can be used in its place. Note that if you have a RAID 5 with no failed disks, you are already protected from the failure of one disk. Creating disk images in that case may be unnecessary.