RAID 5 Recovery Service or Software

[JMasterJ]

Ok I have been informed fairly certainly that my RAID 5 is not rebuildable. 1 of 3 went bad, and before I got that drive back form Samsung, another drive went bad (Samsung HD scan in DOS stated bad a sector). Nice... which means only one healthy drive, no rebuild. So now onto recovery option... getting past the fact that I shoulda woulda coulda have had a real backup, etc, I need to make a decison here how to try to gain some data back, and any opinions would be appreciated, especially if you have done or gone through this before....

I see this software for $800

Quick Recovery for RAID-5 Download - RAID-5 Data Recovery Software

but at less than 3 MB, can it be legit, or anyone heard of this?

I called what seems like a good company, drivesavers.com, and they said about a $400 charge even if NO data is saved, some analysis fee... but they said from my case, they should be able to save most data... to save and deliver, they say for me about $4500, but can be less if they recover less than all the data, like per GB or # of vital files they cannot restore... I will talk to them more tomorrow. But of course I rather just spend the $800 (ya, JUST) and do it myself if this is valid software that wont also eradicate my data and make it totally non-recoverable.

Of if anyone has another place or software that works for this situation, please let me know, thanks.

[no1_vern]

Hi JmasterJ, Welcome to TechIMO! I have bad news for you.
In a raid 5 array the parity information of the array is spread over all the hard disks (no parity disk exists as in Raid 4).

The loss of one disk from the array wasnt a too bad, but losing 2 disks of a 3 disk array is killer. For any real chance of full data recovery you MUST have more than half of the data/parity info. IF you have not sent the second disk off, Keep it, and attempt to recover the array using the hardware and software combo used to create/keep the array. Recover all your data to a SEPARATE disk/drive! With 2/3 of your data missing, you can kiss any real chance of data recovery bye-bye unless your willing to send your array to a professional service.

Do not spend $800 on this software as it will tell you that it needs some of the info on the missing drives.

As a side note: Using a Raid array doesnt stop the need for good high quality backups! Preferably multiple backups with off-site backups also.

Anything worth a raid 5 array deserves full weekly backups with incremental daily backups preferably Off-site. For the cost of an external drive(or even just a CD-DVD writer/disks if your critical data were small enough), as little as $150, you could have extra copies of your data, and would not be hurting rigt now.

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

Yeah, I have to agree with Vern, unfortunately you are likely to have lost the majority of the data (at best) and would essentially be throwing money at the possiblility of getting some of it back...

TBH, it would always be CONSIDERABLY cheaper to buy the best backup utility (or even just use NTBACKUP..!!) to back up to a separate physical drive.

Failing to run backups could be seen as the data not being of much importance... My highest priorities in a server environment are: disk space; Exchange space/limits; backups; AV; UPS, updates and RAID status checks....

[JMasterJ]

Quote:

Originally Posted by no1_vern

IF you have not sent the second disk off, Keep it, and attempt to recover the array using the hardware and software combo used to create/keep the array. Recover all your data to a SEPARATE disk/drive! With 2/3 of your data missing, you can kiss any real chance of data recovery bye-bye unless your willing to send your array to a professional service.

Do not spend $800 on this software as it will tell you that it needs some of the info on the missing drives.

Are you telling me to try to use the Intel Matrix Console to try to rebuild the array? If so for some reason that software wont install in my single drive I am running right now, keeps saying my system doesnt meet the minimum requirements, maybe bec it doesnt see a RAID set anymore? So what other software/hardware do you mean I can use to try this?

If not, I will have to send away and eat the cost, no choice.

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

Before you send it away...

Do you know what type of connectors they use...? If you have a computer that also uses that type of connector, you could try each disk and see what info the "host" computer can see of/on the disk. Bear in mind that you should NOT try to initialise or "import" it into any array you may have on this host.

Try the above on each disk in turn. There's an incredibly high probability that you won't be able to do anything with the data, but you can sometimes still see base-level information and this could potentially mean that even a "bad" disk can still hold a decent proportion of it's overall storage.

This means that if you have one decent disk, and one that has bad sectors, you could get more than no data back if you need to send it off.......

[JMasterJ]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nude_Lewd_Man

Do you know what type of connectors they use...? If you have a computer that also uses that type of connector, you could try each disk and see what info the "host" computer can see of/on the disk. Bear in mind that you should NOT try to initialise or "import" it into any array you may have on this host.

Try the above on each disk in turn. There's an incredibly high probability that you won't be able to do anything with the data, but you can sometimes still see base-level information and this could potentially mean that even a "bad" disk can still hold a decent proportion of it's overall storage.

This means that if you have one decent disk, and one that has bad sectors, you could get more than no data back if you need to send it off.......

How do I know what connectors they use? What else besides SATA is there for this type.... I used the RAID on my Abit IP35 Pro, is there some way I can look it up?

I have the disks hooked in right now and when I try to access them it gives an error in XP Pro, "E:/ is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable" [i assume this is the one with the bad sector] and the other one says it s not formatted [i assume this is the good one].

Someone also suggested I try mirroring the bad drive over to the good one and maybe save more data that way. Do you know if that will work and how?

[Steve R Jones]

Quote:

Someone also suggested I try mirroring the bad drive over to the good one and maybe save more data that way. Do you know if that will work and how?

If you can't access the files on the bad drive you can't mirror it.