Trying to understand if I got these Linux Terminal commands right to backup RAW RAID drives before attempting recovery

Cyber Akuma

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I have two 1TB SSDs that were part of a RAID0 array that held a Windows install. The drives themselves are fine, as is the data on them, the problem is that their controller (the motherboard that was running them in Intel raid) died. I have a backup, but it's from last July, and while this would still be a large chunk (like 98% or so) of my data, I would like to be able to recover my current data if possible.

I have been told that I can try just connecting them to any Intel board with the same or newer chipset and it should recognize them if it's in RAID mode, and was also told about being able to use dmraid in Linux to try to recover it without relying on the motherboard's controller.

Thing is, I am very new to Linux, with Mint being the one I am most familiar and experienced with, and most information I found on dmraid was just copies of it's man page. It's not a very easy or straightforward application to use for someone who is new, and since I was very worried I could easily run the wrong command somehow and corrupt my raid, I was suggested I could try making raw backup images of the individual disks first before attempting to mount them together and recover them.

Thing is.... I am also very unsure how to do this either, but at least it seems a bit more straightforward and better documented than dmraid, so.....

I was told to "navigate to an empty backup drive" and then to run a specific DD command on each drive to dump an image of it, but I want to make sure I understood it all before I try. I don't have the replacement hardware yet to actually try it yet, but I want to make sure I have everything in order before I attempt it.

I am going to be using the latest Linux Mint:

Ok, so I will boot Mint off a USB drive, plug in the backup drive (was recommended to format it in NTFS so it can be easily read in both Linux and Windows) into USB using a SATA enclosure, and then plug one of the SSDs from the RAID in by USB using a SATA dock. Then I...

"navigate to an empty backup drive" I can do that in the Windows CLI but I am not entirely sure how to do this in the terminal in Linux. I know that Mint automatically should mount said NTFS backup drive so I shouldn't have to worry about manually mounting it, but how do I navigate to it in the terminal to make it the currently active directory? The command I was given will dump the image to wherever you are currently in the terminal, so I need to run it from "the backup drive" in the terminal.

Then I was told to run this command: "dd if=/dev/sd(drive1) of=drive1 bs=1M"

And likewise for the second drive I would use "dd if=/dev/sd(drive2) of=drive2 bs=1M"

Another issue though.... how do I identify what device (as in sda, sdb, etc) Linux sees the drive as? It's a single disk in a RAID0 array so it's not going to be mountable, so I need to access the physical device itself and not a partition. I tried to look it up and apparently the command "lsblk" should list them for me? Would it still be listed under /dev/sd(whatever) if it's a SATA device connected over USB? Or would it be listed as something else because it's connected by USB and not directly by SATA? I don't want to accidently read, or even worse, write to the wrong device.

And is there any other issues or suggestions one has with this method I am attempting?

Another thing that came to mind, so if I do manage to successfully back up the raw disks, and then mount my two disks with dmraid in Linux..... what would be the best way to then dump them into a backup image that I can restore to a new single disk that would still boot Windows? Windows by default creates about 3-4 partitions on a disk that store other boot information, so I can't just clone the Windows partition alone if I want to clone the disk in a bootable state. Normally I just boot into backup software to clone my disks, but I obviously can't do that if I can only have the disks mounted on a software level because I am using dmraid, so I have to create a backup image of the whole disk in Linux, and then restore that image to another disk in Linux, and still have it remain Windows bootable.
 

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