hi,

have a 4 hdd raid lacie with Seagate Barracuda 3TB SATA HDD ST3000DM001, raid 5. need to recover data. filesystem is hfs+
tried to clone drives with r-image but 2 disk as seen as 2tb within os but bios recognized well
i think it'n not a software problem but a hardware problem. firmware?
have you any tips?

thanks

These ST3000DM001 drives look to be VERY bad!!"""!!!!!!

i assume that your OS can correctly see 02 drives as 3TB, right ?
what about s.m.a.r.t status of these two drives which OS see as 2TB?
give it a try with DMDE, if it helps.

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Data Recovery Pakistan

are you using WinXP? or 7?

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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

Which OS ?
HFS+ makes me think you could be using Mac OS. Is it ?

When you tell that your OS does not see the right size, are you speaking from :
a) the size of the partition where the data are stored?
b) the size of the whole drive, as you can see it in the in the disk management tool?
c) some other info like thus in "About this Mac"?

Is your OS 32-bit or 64-bit?
It could be the 2 Tb limit of 32-bit systems.

Also, did you clone your drive from a smaller drive (e.g. 2 Tb)?

There is certainly an answer to your question, but you need to provide more details.

solved with mhdd.
restore full size factory.
now after imaged 3 drives of 4 i tried to recover my raid 5 but unsuccessfully.
tried r-studio e reclaime
anyone knows sw to rebuild raid 5 hfs+formatted?
thanks

You stated in your OP that "2 disk as seen as 2tb within os but bios recognized well. That observation is inconsistent with your solution, namely the removal of a 1TB HPA. Instead it appears that the drive's capacity may have been reduced by a BIOS bug such as this one:

GigaByte BIOS bug results in loss of 1TB capacity:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=150&p=275

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

If I had to wager a guess, I'd say you probably messed up the partition table while playing around in MHDD. So now recovering the RAID is going to be more difficult.

Since you are in Italy, I'd recommend you contact Luca: http://www.ultrarecovery.com/

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

How did you arrive at this conclusion from the available information?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

You don't tell what happened to the RAID 5 ; which kind of incident.
It would be valuable information.


Why have you imaged only 3 drives of 4?
From what I understand, you assume that only one drive is defective and that you know which one.
But in RAID-5, problems can arise because more than one drive becomes defective.
As all the drives are from the same model, the issues can arise more or less at the same time.
Furthermore, from what I could read here and there and from what I have seen from customer drives, the ST3000DM001 seem very unreliable ones.

Do you assume that the 3 drives are sane because the imaging could be be done lossless, i.e. could all sectors be replicated to the new drives?

You don't tell how you tried those softwares.
Was each drive in a dock, or connected in SATA?
Or were all drives in your RAID bay?

If your RAID array malfunctionned, this can also come from a hardware problem with your RAID bay.

From my experience, automatic detection of RAID parameters fail in many cases.
Examining the content of the drives with an hexadecimal editor is often the best way to find the RAID parameters.


I can do this kind of data recovery ; you can send me a personal message if interested.

I believe that instead of restoring the RAID architecture, which is risky, you should first consider recovering you data, which is virtually reconstruct the RAID and extract the data to a healthy data carrier.

If you still want to use RAID-5 after this data recovery, you could reinitialize your RAID-5 and copy the recovered data back to it.
In such operation, it is possible to keep the original dates and file attributes.

One last things, RAID arrays, especially for RAID-5 require drives which are optimized to withstand vibrations ; these are expensive discs.
You cannot blindly use whatever kind of disk for RAID arrays.
But some (and possibly most) RAID arrays are unfortunately sold with low-end drives, because the common customer focuses on the price per terrabyte and is not aware that there are drives much reliable than others. From what I have seen, even quite expensive storages designed for small businesses are built with poor discs inside. It's better to purchase the storages without discs, and then put quality discs inside.