Data Recovery Resources and RAID How To Guides
Hard drive recovery and data recovery resource center with how to guides for RAID, NAS, file system repair
Why Choose DTI Data Recovery
Why Choose DTI Data? DTI DATA offers flat rate pricing as well as "no fix, no fee" pricing. If we don't recover your data you are not charged anything! Including: hard drive recovery, RAID and laptop data recovery. Call us Toll Free 1-866-438-6932 or 1-727-345-9665 for a FREE quote on data recovery. You can also use our online quote form. Know Your Data Recovery Company! Anybody can claim … [Read More...]
DATA RECOVERY SOLUTIONS
File Data Recovery Step by Step
File Data Recovery Guide Problem: A file that you now need has been deleted from your hard drive data on the C drive. Solution: Shut down the computer. It is important not to run the machine anymore. Windows works under the idea that areas of the harddrive that have been used before are used first. This means that as you are surfing looking for a solution you can potentially be overwriting file data. NOTE: Make sure that you click the arrow next to shut down and select restart. We do … [Read More...]
SAN Data Recovery – iSCSI RAID 6 Issue
Serial attached SCSI devices have been a high speed blessing to the SAN, NAS, and Enterprise Storage Array class of systems. These devices offer a clear solution for any storage requirement due to capacity and configuration. Whether it is Fiber Channel mounted VMware or iSCSI configured raw data access these devices are undoubtedly a smart choice for any enterprise. With that being said when these systems go down due to multiple hard drive failures it is up to the data recovery expert to extract … [Read More...]
Lost File System Recovered
The Mysterious Case of the Missing File System Sometimes there is just no way to ascertain the events leading up to the loss of an entire file system index. The client may have no idea what happened. When looking at the file system as a whole there are no telltale markers left behind. So the only course of action is to analyze what you have and repair the anomalies. In retrospect it was an interesting exercise in data recovery, however, not knowing how it happened is still irritating. DTI … [Read More...]
Troubleshooting Basic Hard Drive Problems: You Need to Format the Disk
A common hard drive fault that I think most of us have run in to at one time or another is : “You Need to Format the Disk in Drive:”. This problem seems to be even more prevalent with the popularity of portable external hard drives like the Seagate Goflex or the Western Digital My Passport. I attribute the problem to not safely removing the USB drive from the operating system before unplugging the drive. The reason this causes a problem is that Windows is always caching to the hard drive … [Read More...]
Hard Drive Recovery: What does it mean?
Hard drive recovery is a very broad term. However, data recovery companies use it to describe a situation where the hard drive itself is no longer functioning. A hard drive can have many different file systems from Windows, MAC, Linux or, even a very proprietary file system for a specific use. So, when we here at DTIData receive a call from a user that is unable to access their data we have to determine if the hard drive needs to be recovered or repaired to a state where we can then access … [Read More...]
RAID and SERVER TECHNOLOGY
VMFS File System Reconstruction (Part 1)
Recently DTI Data received a challenge in the form of a VMWare ESXi 5.1 server which contained 16 (sixteen) 2 (two) terabyte Seagate ST2000DM001 hard drives. These drives were configured as a RAID 10, 8 (eight) drives for each side of a RAID 0 mirrored. The RAID had dropped what looked like 3 (three) drives and this is what degraded the array to the point of where it no longer functioned. In a RAID 10 all that really needs to happen is to drop one drive from each side of the mirror then the … [Read More...]
Unable to Rebuild a RAID 5 Array
RAID Configuration: 4 Seagate Barracuda Green 2 TB SATA hard drives (model ST2000DL003) configured as a RAID 5 connected to an on-board Intel RAID controller. Problem with RAID: Because of the nature of Green drives, specifically that they will spin down in low use periods, the array will periodically have a disk report as offline. The fix this customer was using was to mark the offline drive as active and rebuild the RAID. Unfortunately, a drive eventually did fail and on trying the … [Read More...]
RAID 5 Sybase Data File Diagnostic Software
Recently I received a set of drives that were originally in a RAID 5 (stripe set) configuration. These drives were old Seagate forty gigabyte Parallel ATA (PATA) drives. The client explained that they had rebooted the server and when it came up again the file system had been corrupted and the operating system would not load. After some data massaging, and an operating system install on another partition, the system was revived enough so they could pull data from the drives. However the data was … [Read More...]
Determining configuration for RAID Five or RAID Zero
Reading the title makes it sound like something that should be easy. I should be able to just pull out the drives in the order they are presented in the hardware, mark them as 0 through whatever and be done with it. However it has been my experience that when determining the RAID configuration, there are several considerations that must addressed before an accurate RAID setup can be resolved. First of all there are many systems that present the drives in the opposite order they are configured … [Read More...]
DTI Data’s Many Options For RAID Data Recovery
DTI Data has been in the RAID Data Recovery business for a long time. We focus on RAID 5 data recovery, which is still the prelevant system in storage devices such as DELL PowerEdge Servers. Many RAID systems such RAID 50 is still built off of the basic RAID 5 configuration. A RAID 10 is built off of a straight RAID 0 which is a striped array and offers no truly sound backup if one or more drives fail in the array. DTI Data offers many solutions to recover or even repair RAID arrays, whether … [Read More...]
EXCHANGE DATA RECOVERY
Missing Exchange Data File
I had a customer recently that called saying his Network Attached Storage (NAS) device had crashed and now his Exchange Priv.edb was missing. He tried running checkdisk on it, tried several undelete and file recovery programs with no luck. The weird thing about it was that viewing the properties of the drive letter under windows showed 140 GB in use even though the only other file on the drive was the Priv.stm streaming file which was 60 GB in size. Luckily for me that it was a network drive, … [Read More...]
Exchange Data Recovery Guide
First and foremost, DON’T PANIC. I cannot remember how many times I have seen somebody (myself included) do something completely idiotic and often times irreversible because they didn’t take the time to think things through. For example, wanting SO badly to get the database mounted again before anybody notices that you don’t do the MOST important step when recovering any data, making a backup and working off of the backed up copy rather than your live data. That being said, here are … [Read More...]
Recovering a badly fragmented Outlook PST file after a few rounds with chkdsk The Final Installment
Welcome back! As before, we still have the problem where chkdsk was run on a RAID with a stale drive. We have had a brief explanation of how NTFS 5 works and how the data is stored on the volume. Lets take a much more detailed look as to how the data is stored in a virtual database and how this helped me recover the PST file. There are two types of databases. Static, and virtual. A static database is allocated before run time, and the size stays the same. In addition, the record … [Read More...]
Starting Exchange Server with a blank Information Store
Starting Exchange Server with a blank Information Store There are some situations where starting Microsoft Exchange with a blank database may be necessary. In my line of work, I run across a large amount of businesses that have had their Exchange Private Information Store corrupted and the whole organizations Email capabilities halted as well. Quite often, getting the users back up and running takes precedence over getting the data back. Don’t get me wrong; the data is still extremely … [Read More...]
Exchange Server Tools: Use ExMerge To Import PST Files
Exmerge is a very usefull tool that can import PST files back into your Exchange Server Information Stores. Here is a tutorial from our Exchange Engineer John Best on how to use ExMerge. Using ExMerge to import PST files 1. Place all of the PST files that you want imported into a single Folder 2. Make sure the Exchange Information Service is started 3. You need to make sure the account you are logged in with is an administrative account and … [Read More...]
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