Raid Reconstructor is pretty good at trying things automatically on which you would spend several hours manually. I am just letting you know that if Captain Nemo fails, GetDataBack may actually succeed. GDB may take forever to run on an array of that size.

One approach could be to populate the array box with blank disks and build a new array. Then figure out all the array settings with a hex editor and apply them in Raid Reconstructor.

It's not easy, but doable. There are better experts than me in this thread, however. I am not confident in my ability to fix this particular RAID given the difficulties you'd already encountered. You may want to work with them. You will need a lot of storage (enough to store the images of the damaged array + capacity to write out the damaged array to a new disk or array) connected to that computer and you will also need to image all the drives regardless of good or bad.

Hi Terranova, could yo post me the Server Manufacturer and the controler

Hope i can help you

Already some days go by and no solution.

By now manual process would have provided solution.

Forget about controller - never need this info.
Forget about TRYING this and that and this and that.
You supposed to be expert or data recovery engineer.

Do you go to doctor who's going to try this and that ?

You can start (HFS) by finding some large text type file (Image view)
Audio video files often can find an xml file or something.

File could be contiguous over all drives at same location (Stripe), then you
can find start & end points on piece (stripe) (gives stripe size most often)
then you can match start end points over all drives then you can determine
pattern (RAID type, rotation) - then you can work to find start point.

Finding start point of raid (unless obvious) is most work.

Once you got stripe size, parity rotation and start point move to some program.

Manual process for NTFS is much, much easier - hint use getdataback to record
scan at common MFT entries - quite often near sector 6 300 000 on single drive.

So in 4 drive raid - scan from sector 2.0m to sector 2.3m (6.0m - 6.9m)
You will be amazed (not always) how raid configuration just stares at you
from the printout of this scan - you will see parity, stripe size and easy work
your way back to start point, if needed.

Success!!

I have just had some great success with DiskInternal's RAID Recover tool -
neither Raid Reconstructor or R-Studio could make any useable sense of the broken set,
R-Studio gave me a million or so files, but no directory structure - but Raid Recovery gave me results 1st try!! - one happy engineer and one VERY happy customer

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It's better to ask a stupid Question - than to make a stupid mistake
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Luke Healey
Datalab Data Recovery
Hamilton
New Zealand

Hi lukehealey,

Well done, you tried, you clicked and clicked and clicked and tried and voila you succeeded.
That's professional DR in motion ..........

We can conclude that R-Studio and Raid Reconstructor are useless !

Lukehealey is trying to be helpful, and if he was able to save his customers RAID data by 'clicked clicked clicked' then who cares, the outcome is the same.

He did not have to share this information, but he chose to share, and sharing is what makes this forum so beneficial to us all, you included.

cheers hddguy-

yeah sure - you can spend a lot of time and effort trying to identify a RAID configuration the 'hands on' way - or 'click and click' and get meaningful results in a short time with efficency. it may not be the most elegant or artful way of achieving the desired result - but it gets results.

I'm doing my best to learn how things like RAID really work 'under the hood' but at the same time I have customers to look after and achieve results for.

In my case - i tried to analyse the array in question - but could not fully understand what had gone wrong. two tools failed to give results and I have a customer who's business was crippled by the loss of an accounting package - so i try something else. Time was critical.

I now have a clone of the original array in it's broken state which i'm going to work on at my leisure. ..... everyone wins!!

I say - if there are tools to get a result from a minor-moderate problem = USE THEM!! if that fails - go hands on and work it out.

Learn - yes - Learn at all costs - but teach as well - with humility and care, not spite (cheers coffeebean) -

_________________
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It's better to ask a stupid Question - than to make a stupid mistake
---------------

Luke Healey
Datalab Data Recovery
Hamilton
New Zealand

Thank you all for participating in this topic, after long hours finally I got the data back. Thanks for pointing me to the right direction in finding the parameters, especially to "BETO" with a very helpful hints.

It could be very interesting to develop some kind of nice competition (not for money) for thins kind of work. (arrays)

If a small amount of sectors of each drives could be shared (20 MB of each drive for example) to the rest of the forum, the solution could be resolved in a couple of hours.....for free !...just for the spirit of contribution.....and for the proud of the winner.

I´m glad you could make it.

So what were the settings, if I may ask?

It would help not to reinvent the wheel the next time someone runs into this beast.

After using Winhex to determine the right strip size but also the right order of drives, then I used RStudio to resconstruct, backward parity, stripe size 128.

why didn't you use winhex to build? It's better than R Studio. R studio you normally have to scan whole array, winhex can build directory structure on the fly.

Isn't it what I told U ?

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Would be interesting to see a new thread with the RAID settings for multiple controllers. A list of the used parity direction and stripesize which led to recoveries could be an interesting topic. There is such a topic on the Xways forum, but lists just a small few.

winhex doesnt support HFS+

It does.

depends on the license type.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Need the forensic licence for versions below 13.7, and specialist licence after with a dongle.