Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

I have a first generation ReadyNAS, 4 x 1TB array, using XRAID.
Scenario:
Disk#1 = Click of death, cannot even be seen/recognized as a disk by other SATA controllers.
DISK#2 = No damage, partitions shown when disk is examined.
DISK#3 = No damage, partitions shown when disk is examined.
DISK#4 = Had a momentary SATA hiccup, disk was initialized. Data still there, but partition table (or equivalent) was deleted. A scan shows the partitions can be recovered.

Attempted to image all four disks, got raw bit-for-bit images of disks 2,3, and 4. DISK#1 is unable to be imaged by my (consumer-level) equipment, as it just clicks and is then not seen as a device.
Is recovery even possible with r-studio? Recover the missing partition table for DISK#4, and bring the array up, and get it to regenerate the first disk's missing info from the 3 existing disks? like you would if you had a failed drive in a physical array.
PLEEEEASE tell me it is, as I am not looking forward to dropping thousands on a data recovery company, in order to salvage childhood pics of our kids!

XRAID can be very complex as it's not a standard type of RAID. I'm not saying it's impossible using R-Studio, but it's not going to be easy. Probably will take a lot of work creating manual regions and stitching them together by hand if you get what I'm saying. Unless you're very experienced with RAID data recovery, I'd suggest you seek out some help with this case.

Where are you located?

Just north of the Tampa Bay area, Florida, USA.

As all three of the remaining disks are the same size/make/model, they should have identical geometry, no?
Wouldn't it be possible to clone the partition table from one of the working drives, and place it onto the one with no table?

It works in my imagination, why can't it work in real-life? haha

Perhaps someone who's worked on these could take a remote look at it to see what the situation is. I'd guess that the partition table is found on all disks, so that really isn't the biggest issue at all. In fact I'd say it's pretty much a moot point.

What's the specific model of the NAS? Do you know if it's X-RAID or X-RAID2, or was it possibly just configured as a RAID 5 since it's all equal sized drives and doesn't need to be hybrid?

ReadyNAS NV
RNNVS2000
Still says Infrant Technologies, Inc. on the sticker on the back.

Can R-Studio recover an array when there are three disks of a four disk RAID-5 available? Like, bring the array up in degraded status so that the data can be read/backed up to another device?

Yes, it can work with one missing drive of a RAID 5. However, autodetection will fail 100% of the time in such a case. It'll require someone with the knowledge to manually determine all the settings to do it.

Is it an XRAID of RAID5?

Sorry, but I don't even know for sure what you mean by that.
That model of NAS had its own version of raid, which allowed it to expand, etc.
It was called X-RAID, I believe.
The array used all four 1TB drives, and could support single-drive failure.
Does that answer the question?

This NAS can be configured as a X-RAID/2 or RAID5. If it's a RAID5, you can easily create a virtual RAID5, if it's configured as an X-RAID, I'm not sure it'll be possible to create it straightforwardly.