How to use mdadm to assemble arrays from crashed windows server

Solution 1:

You don't use mdadm because it cannot handle this job. It has only very limited support for disks that were in hardware RAID arrays, to wit: DDF, and not everyone used that format.

Instead you should be using dmraid to attempt to explore and recover this array. It supports a variety of software, hardware and fake RAID formats. On a recent Linux system it will support:

$ dmraid -l
asr     : Adaptec HostRAID ASR (0,1,10)
ddf1    : SNIA DDF1 (0,1,4,5,linear)
hpt37x  : Highpoint HPT37X (S,0,1,10,01)
hpt45x  : Highpoint HPT45X (S,0,1,10)
isw     : Intel Software RAID (0,1,5,01)
jmicron : JMicron ATARAID (S,0,1)
lsi     : LSI Logic MegaRAID (0,1,10)
nvidia  : NVidia RAID (S,0,1,10,5)
pdc     : Promise FastTrack (S,0,1,10)
sil     : Silicon Image(tm) Medley(tm) (0,1,10)
via     : VIA Software RAID (S,0,1,10)
dos     : DOS partitions on SW RAIDs

Connect the copies of all the disks you made to a system, turn the computer on, and use dmraid -r to see if a set of RAID devices was detected, dmraid -s <set name> to get properties of the set, dmraid -b to see the status of all block devices that may be part of a set, and if everything looks ok, dmraid -ay <set name> will activate the RAID array.