RAID tags and what they mean
When reassembling a RAID in TaskForce 2, start by selecting the drives and/or images it consists of. The system reads the first 3 million sectors of each RAID member, analyzes the data and compares the members against each other. TaskForce 2 then labels the RAID members with appropriate tags to help you identify the condition, relation and possible position.
Spare
The Spare tag informs you that 99.95% of the drive’s initial 3M sectors are filled with zeros.
A spare (aka hot spare) drive in RAID arrays is used as a standby drive reserved to replace a RAID member in case it fails: in this situation the RAID controller uses redundancy data to reconstruct the data from the failed disk to the spare one. Spare drives are used in RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 6.
Mirror
With the Mirror tag, TaskForce 2 informs you that 99.5% out of the analyzed 3M sectors are identical to the same sectors on a different RAID member. It works as a hint that you are dealing with a RAID 1, RAID 10 or RAID 50.
MBR
MBR (Master Boot Record) points to the drive(s) that contain an MBR. Therefore, it is likely that the drive with detected MBR can be placed first in the given array.
File system tags
The initial 3M sectors of each drive/image are analyzed to identify a boot sector of any known file system. When a partition boot sector is detected, the corresponding file system tag is added. To see LBA offset and sector count of the partition, hover mouse cursor over the tag.
Supported file system tags: NTFS, ext4/3/2, APFS, HFS, HFS+, exFAT, FAT32, FAT16, XFS.
Additionally, Unknown tag may appear if the file system identification is not supported yet.
Error
The Error tag informs you whether there are read errors encountered in the process of RAID autodetection. To see the exact number of encountered errors, hover mouse over the Error tag to get the tooltip.
