Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

Sorry it took so long to reply, when the scan was close to finishing I came back and my computer had locked up for some reason so I had to start it all over agian. But the good news is that when it completed it found the missing volume along with like 8 other random chunks of empty space. Exploring into the volume showed all the files like I could see before with my first short scan, but I can actually recover them! So for anyone facing this same issue, make sure you are scanning the entire RAID and not just the "Empty Space" chunk that shows up.

That didn't see to provide anything I didn't already have. The failing disk is getting worse too, so I am back to using the 2 good images. What I am trying now is scanning the entire disk instead of just the free space. It is taking MUCH longer so I am hoping it provides some results. Before it finished in like 30 minutes but scanning the entire RAID has been running over 14 hours and still has 10 more left at least. I will update when it finishes.

That might help, and definitely worth trying. I recommend you to use an image of the failing disk rather than the disk itself.

Another thing I was thinking of trying is to add the failing disk to the reconstructed RAID instead of using blank disk. So I would have the 2 images from the good disks and the failing disk that seems to have the information needed for rebuilding since it only tries rebuilding if that disk is present. Would that help at all?

Yeah I looked at them. There are a number of files there (no names obviously), but I don't think it was close to how many there should be. The Recognized0 volume shows all the files and structure and even file sizes, but I can't restore from there. I will check when I can about the Raw files and see how many are actually there and if restoring them works.

I look at the picture and see that the empty space is app. 185GB, and it contains a Recognized0 partition of 3.64TB. No surprise, files are outside the area bounds.
Maybe, it's indeed the result of a failed attempt to rebuild the RAID.

Did you look at Raw files?

The RAID controller is just the onboard motherboard one (Intel Rapid Storage). It is a RAID 5 with 3 disks (3TB each). I am not exactly sure what caused it to be marked as failed, but here are the events leading up to it: A disk marked as failed, but it was still working so the RAID rebuilt I think on the next startup. After the rebuild, it was running really really slow with high read latency. I checked the health of the disks and the one that had been marked as failed had warnings in Crystal Disk Info. I thought I could shutdown and remove that disk and then backup data before my replacement arrived running in degraded state, but it didn't work. When I started it back up it was failed instead of degraded. Maybe it tried rebuilding or something again, not sure.

Successfully imaged the 2 good disks with no errors and that is what I used to recover data from the first volume. As for the size and position of the empty space, I believe it matches up to the lost volume. Here is a screen shot of the reconstructed RAID and scan results: http://i.imgur.com/BQjMKr8.png

Are the size and position of this empty space coincide with those of the lost volume?

Got any details about the RAID hardware it came out of? Did you clone the drives? If so, we're there any errors? When you read the RAID meta data, which drive failed first? How long was it offline?

I have reconstructed a RAID 5 that was marked as failed an successfully recovered data from one of the volumes. One of them was missing for some reason, but when I scanned the empty space the files from that volume showed up. I am having issues recovering them though. Some show as 0 files size and won't open when recovered, and some give the error:

Start postion of file (697239351296) is outside filesystem size (198479445504) while recovering "blah". Try to recover this file using all recognized partitions.
Recovering file blah failed. Can't read file to be recovered completely (801).

Any ideas what I can do to resolve this?