Hi,

I have a RAID 5 system in a NAS which refuses to start.

The XOR test from "RAID Reconstructor" (by runtime.org) shows that there are locations where the RAID 5 is ok, locations where the result of the XOR test is ambiguous and lastly a few locations where XOR test fails.

The parameters of the RAID 5 were found and the data were recovered and saved at several locations.
So, I can even do a fresh reinstall now. But, if possible, I would prefer keeping the data on the drives of the RAID 5.
I writed down the miscellaneous RAID 5 parameters, so that I can use them again.

The NAS allows hot swap of a drive and its documentation tells it restores the RAID 5 on it.
But depending on how this is implemented, it could write all the freshly inserted drive using the informations from the other drives, destroying data which could possibly be useful to restore the data from other drives.

So, I'm looking for a write-capable software to check the RAID stripes and correct only which one should and on which drive it should. Possibly a free software or preferably not too expensive.

Thank you for your suggestions.

Generally, any software capable to create software RAID arrays should help to have some play with a stuff like this, but I'm unsure if there's a lot of reason in doing that.

If you are sure that all the necessary data is recovered and OK, then simply re-use the drives to create a new array and copy it over.

If not, try to reassemble the array without one drive first and see what happens then. It could easily happen that one of the drives has been dropped out of the system some time ago.
I'd do such check in UFS Explorer:
http://www.ufsexplorer.com/download_stdrr.php

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• Remote RAID, NAS, SAN, VMware, DVR (CCTV), flash and tape recovery. Data recovery support.

Am Asuming your talking about the DX4000 WD

General Solution:

Export the RAID Image >> write it back to single HDD >> (fix the Problem if exists) >> write it back to the Array

sounds simple, hard to know from where to start with.

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Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

2) That means one or few drives had bad sectors or bad areas, or wasn't working some period of time, where data wasn't stored properly , you never know which stripes is incorrect to fix them based on the parity , or the parity itself is not correct written.
1) To make it run , just need to regenerate meta section , but it won't guarantee you get access to the working properly stored files.
So, go to the first option, you've been suggested: Save to the different location, recreate new RAID, save data back.

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Angel Data Recovery