The user neglected the server and at some point a single disk failed, it is clicking.
Then sometime later something caused the two remaining disks to send the array into a failed status.
A previous company looked at the problem and I'm uncertain of the arrangement of the disks.
Following the excellent article here: http://www.r-tt.com/Articles/Finding_RAID_parameters/
I was able to determine the offset is 0, and as suspected the stripe size is the default 64KB, and it seems I now know the order of the disks, the failed disk is disk1, and the other two disks which a quick test shows are fine are disk 2 and 3. Oh and it is Left Asynchronous. (which seems normal for an intel raid)
Prior to creating my image (hadn't run into R-Studio at that point) I read on the Intel site that removing the array and re-establishing the same parameters can get you to the point where testdisk may detect the partition and re-write it to the drive.
So I did this, found a partition after scanning for a long time and wrote it without checking if it had a file listing (regretting that now) it failed to bring up a working partition. I then found R-Studio and created compressed images of the disks.
So to my questions:
1) On the images when I add them to the Virtual Raid they show "Info/Bus" showing one disk as #0 RAID 0:0 (serial ending in 9TN) and the other #2 RAID 0:2 (serial ending in XWR) this doesn't match my analysed partition scheme (failed, XWR, 9TN) or the invalid raid layout I did when I recreated the array (i did 9TN(0), XWR(1), new blank disk(2)), so where is it pulling this from, is this just showing where it was connected on the motherboard when I imaged it? The array was deleted when I imaged them so I'm not sure where it pulled that from.
2) What does check raid consistency do in my situation? I assume it won't be effective because the raid has a "missing disk" added.
3) When I put the raid together it doesn't find any partition (unless I run a scan) is this because it was on the failed disk or because I may have squashed it with testdisk? Pretty sure I know the answer here
Based on the situation I feel I should be able to get something from this disk, despite my having written a partition table to the raid when the disks were in the wrong order. But maybe I'm wrong, I did find an $MFT record on one of the working disks, and found several FILE0 records which following them proved to me the sequence of writes to the disk.
I can get a directory tree with almost all the folders using the disk order that I analysed, but any file over 64KB is corrupted(even some under 64KB are no good). This tells me the disk order may be wrong. Am I right?