Advice for Raid recovery

Discussions on using the professional data recovery program R-STUDIO for RAID re-construction, NAS recovery, and recovery of various disk and volume managers: Windows storage spaces, Apple volumes, and Linux Logical Volume Manager.
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Advice for Raid recovery

Post by flickr » Wed Jul 22, 2009 10:01 am

Hi there,
Hope someone might point me in the right direction.
Here's my situation. I have a Highpoint 2680 sata 8 chan card, with 3x1Tb disks in raid 5. This was working perfectly. Then, I added a disk using the online capacity expansion tool OCE (software util) which was running fine for about 20 mins, where I could still access the disk in windows. After this, the O/s locked up (I was running windows 2008 r2 x64). After I hard reset, which was all I could do, the system booted back up, I checked the raid util, which had restarted the OCE process automatically. However, this time the disk was inaccessible in windows, just showing as a RAW partition. I contacted Highpoint who told me I cannot cancel the OCE, I can only pause it.
Now I reinstalled my O/S in case this was causing the crash (which happened about 20 mins into each attempt) and the same thing happened, so I can only assume its an issue with either the controller and the disks, or the util and w2008 r2.
So now I have booted up into Windows 7 32bit to test, I thought before I go any further I'd try and see if I can recover any data. So with the additional disk unplugged I've run a scan using R-Studio (still running, its a 2TB GPT partition).

I ran a short scan (cancelled part way through to see if it had found anything, which it had) and the text files were ok but the jpgs i tested were corrupt. I've yet to test any larger (video) files I recovered.

My question, is has anyone experience with this type of scenario and what would your next steps be? Try and continue with the scan, or attempt to do the rest of the OCE before recovering any files? I am just unsure of exactly what the nature of the partition is considering its probably part changed by the raid migration (or is it, considering the test scan seems to have partly worked). Because of the size of the partition, its probably looking like a week just to finish the first quick scan so I thought I'd seek advice while I'm waiting.

Hope for some help,
Many thanks in advance.

Alt
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Re: Advice for Raid recovery

Post by Alt » Thu Jul 23, 2009 3:52 am

I'd continue scanning and see the results.

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Re: Advice for Raid recovery

Post by flickr » Thu Jul 23, 2009 5:20 am

Unfortunately this morning I came down to find my system at the raid bios screen, the system having reset itself and one disk showing as missing. Unplugging power from an unused disk, and reconnecting the one supposedly missing made it reappear, however it now duplicated the raid sets including itself in one with the others missing, and the original set with the others in and the single disk missing. I am now forced to delete the duplicate raid set and unplug all my drives from the raid card, I will attempt to connect them as individual drives and build a virtual raid to see if i can recover anything. I'm not holding out any hopes of getting anything back anymore. :( 2Tb of video data down the drain.

Alt
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Re: Advice for Raid recovery

Post by Alt » Thu Jul 23, 2009 5:34 am

Please remember the RAID parameters, such as disk order, block size, etc., to re-construct the RAID correctly, and save the scan info.
I also recommend you to use a 64-bit Windows and our new 64-bit version. You may download it from our download page. It works better with large RAIDs.
And don't lose hope, if the data is not overwritten, they are on the disks.

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Re: Advice for Raid recovery

Post by flickr » Thu Jul 23, 2009 3:38 pm

Thanks Alt,
Testing the new x64 one now, seems much better, I have all the disks in a new v-raid and its scanning, far better than before too. Will let you know in the morning (fingers crossed there are no more crashes ;))

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Re: Advice for Raid recovery

Post by flickr » Fri Jul 24, 2009 4:26 am

OK, so last night went a bit better, if somewhat fruitless as the video data recovered was unplayable. I did select the detailed search but should I be doing things in any particularly special way? I selected all the parameters as they were on the original so just selected the default scan settings and went for it. Alot of data was found, however i estimate probably only a couple of hundred gig out of the 2Tb were in any way not scrambled file names.

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Re: Advice for Raid recovery

Post by Alt » Fri Jul 24, 2009 7:32 am

I'm afraid, the situation is much worse that I thought previously. When you added the disk, the utility started re-distributing the data from 3 to 4 disks. And it was doing that until the system locked.
So you have part of data distributed over 4 disks (at the beginning, with the first copy of MFT) and the rest of data is distributed over 3 disks. That is the problem.
Maybe, it's worth trying to start getting data back in two steps:
1st - create a 3-disk RAID, scan it (maybe not the entire disk, if you can understand for how far the process went) and get data back from that part.
2nd - create a 4-disk RAID and scan it for known file types.

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Re: Advice for Raid recovery

Post by webmaster20 » Thu Jul 30, 2009 7:43 am

Message deleted, as this is a simple spam advertisement. Their products don't support RAIDs.
Alt
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