Data missing after bad server restart

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tullid

Data missing after bad server restart

Post by tullid » Wed Aug 08, 2012 12:22 pm

I have an external drive array with 4 1TB drives in a software raid 5 (I know :( ....I just found out yesterday), connected via eSata to a Dell PE2900 server running Windows 2003 Enterprise. Write-caching was enabled on the external array.

Yesterday one of the employees turned off the array before restarting Windows and the volume no longer mounts in windows once the server was rebooted. clicking on the drive in Windows gives an error "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable" and in Event viewer we see Event ID 55: "The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume".

I purchased r-tools and can see all the data on the bad volume. I recovered what I needed to another drive, but it looks like all data since the last server reboot about a month ago is corrupted. My guess is that since the array was turned off, Windows couldn't commit any writes back to the array and all was lost. double-clicking on any doc, xls, pdf, tif, etc. give various error messages.

Is there any options through R-Tools that could help salvage any of the previous month's data? Has anyone heard of losing that much cache data before?

Thanks

Alt
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Re: Data missing after bad server restart

Post by Alt » Thu Aug 09, 2012 9:27 am

RAID controllers cache mainly the MFT on such volumes, that's why I believe that only the MFT is damaged, whereas most of the file content on the disk is correct. I recommend you to look for the files in the Extra Found Files folders to see if you can find healthy files there.

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