Hi all,
I have 4TB ix4-200d setup as Raid 5 with 2.7TB as storage. few days back I have the red blinking light on the unit front. so pulled the drive which gave the error message out and plugged it in again and restarted and when the unit restarted i got an error message that all drive need to be initialized, so i turn off the unit and pulled all the drives out and plugged them into a server with windows 2008 installed.

obviously windows cannot see the drives since they are linux, i have been trying since then to recover the data. the data is very valuable to me and i cannot lost it. I have been reading alot these days and tried everything i can think of. I DID NOT WRITE ANYTHING ON THE DRIVES, it is recovery software that i am using and trying to recover to another drive with NTFS partition.

here is what I have tried so far:
1. I tried with Raid constructor, I tried different configuration but I cannot figure out the right parameters for the Raid 5 (Block Size, Parity ... etc). any idea what they should be? I searched everywhere on google but i cannot seems to find any good source.

2. I am now trying with UFS explorer, the software managed to find SGI XFS partition with size 2.7TB which to me seems correct. I bought a license for the software and for the plugin to build the raid since I cannot do that on an evaluation software. I am currently running a scan for that XFS partition but from the look of it, it will take days to complete the test. I left the test already running as this is the only thing I can do for now.


Now my question is, is what I am doing correct? Is there any easier way to do this? If there is a success rate for this what would that be?

I am trying to avoid sending the drives to a lab since this is very expensive and out of my budget, added to that I live in the middle east.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

If you mean "Raid constructor" of Runtime Software Raid Reconstructor. Here's an answer from their site:

Q. What do I do with the block size, start sector, and rotation options on the main screen?

A. If you do not know these settings, do not touch these options. The software will determine and set these parameters automatically during the analysis.

Do you have a demo version? If not, did you try to let the software set the parameters automatically?

Good luck!

I have the demo version, and I did try to let the software determine the settings but the software result are not conclusive so I can go beyond that point.

I tried all the tests in the program with no luck.

I think you shouldn't have done all that from the beginning. RAID 5 would usually automatically rebuild itself upon the replacement of the failing drive. You can try to replace the same drive that was blinking with a new one and put it back in the same position as it was before, reconstruction of RAID should begin immediately after replacement, but you should give it some time based on the amount of data.

I would also recommend to contact IOMEGA support and post you problem in their forum.

Good luck!

I have met a bunch of customers replacing drives in raid arrays and the controller failed to rebuild correctly. The result was an array completely messed up.
So it is advisable that u image every single drive marking them up before resyncing the array with a new drive...

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

imaging all 4 TB drives require another 4TB drives and I do not have that luxury that is in additional to a 5th drive to replace the faulty one.

Is there a way to construct the same array somehow on another machines so i can access the data? I have plenty of notebook HDD's that I can use to copy the data but not 4 X 1TB to image.

Thanks for the help and advice.