Recovering photos from complicated RAID Array

[jbromley]

Hi folks, I've just bought a copy of R-Tools to try to recover 400GB of family photographs from the last 20+ years. They were stored on a raid array (which I will describe below), and whilst R-Tools "sees" the files/folders when trying to open the files it just comes up with an "invalid file type" error.

The system they were stored on is a 12x 3TB disk HP DL360 server running Server 2016. The disks are/were in RAID 50 array, giving a total of ~28TB total storage.

We also use MS Data Deduplication (NTFS) on the server.

About a month ago one of the disks failed and took down the entire array (nobody knows why, but it happened)

Put in a replacement disk, array rebuilt itself - BUT essentially it looks like the NTFS fat table got corrupted, so the Virtual disk won't be recognised

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Steps I have done so far to try to recover.

Installed R-Tools
Scanned drive
Found the Drive letter and the missing folder structure, together with the file names of 17k files that I want to (initially) recover
Did a test recovery of about 500 Photos (JPGs), but each of the JPGs appears to be corrupted in some way (i've tested about 100 so far )

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Any ideas what I can check next?

[RForce]

If you have a RAID 50 and it went offline with a single drive failure, it is likely because more than one drive went offline and the HP controller misreported the failure. When you did the rebuild, you very likely rebuilt the array by re-instroducing at least one failed drive that was out of sync, making a huge mess of the data during the rebuild (I hope I'm wrong).

Find the oldest versions of photos and see if they open...if you find that they open, you have your answer. Otherwise, you may have the wrong raid parameters setup.