Recover mdadm raid5 from disk images

Question

My computer just died (won't turn on) and I had some data saved across 4 raid5 disks configured with mdadm. I don't have another computer with sata controllers and want to try to recover using my laptop with a sata to usb adapter.

My plan is to image three of the disks one at a time with dd using the raid5 partion as the image - something like: dd if=/dev/sda1 of=image1.img

Then I'm thinking I should be able to use losetup to map the image file to a device and then assemble these loopback devices.

Will this work? Is there anything I should be aware of when making the images?

Answer 1

I went ahead and tried this and after Many hours of copying the data I created the loop backs with losetup then madm detected and assembled automatically so I mounted and got my data