Recovering from a RAID Controller Failure

There are many reasons why a RAID goes down.  A technician will normally assume that one or more of the drives have failed.  This is a common diagnosis as the diagnostic lights on each of the drives may be blinking, the lights may have gone amber, or... 

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RAID 5 Stale drive detection

Over the course of a week I receive several calls regarding the recovery of a RAID 5 array. In the course of the initial interrogation of a client I ask several questions regarding the state of the array, what has been done to recover the array and most... 

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Network Attached Storage NAS and Other Nightmares

Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices have been a boon for storage technology.  What a great windfall for the industry.  Grab yourself an Open Source operating system, stick it on a prom, get yourself an inexpensive motherboard, some hard drives and... 

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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... 

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RAID Partition Repair Recovery Freeware

Below is a video to help users with our RAID partition repair tool. RAID data recovery is serious business and should be left to professionals, but that being said, so many people have RAID configurations in their home computers that we decided to give... 

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RAID Explained in Simple Terms

I find that “RAID” is such a scary term to a lot of my end users or business clients who are not Network Admin’s. A RAID is in it’s simplest form more then one “physical” (physical means the actual device you would... 

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RAID 1 Data Recovery FREEWARE Full Version RAID Software

DTI Data Recovery is happy to announce a new full version FREEWARE data recovery software for RAID 1 users. If you are using a RAID 1 which is a mirrored set of hard drives, and the RAID no longer boots, than we can help. More home users are getting their... 

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Converting RAID 1 to Single Drive

RAID 1, also known as a mirrored set, would seem to be a perfect way to keep your critical data safe. The concept being that you have redundant drives. Whatever gets written to one drive will get written to the other drive. In other words, the drives... 

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End User Raid Zero Array Crash

I had a client call me the other day and tell me that her two year old two terabyte drive had crashed and all of her pictures of her children, as well as her wedding were on the drive. She did not have a backup and was very upset. I knew that there was... 

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Partition Types in a Soft Spanned Set

  Last time I explained the basic premise of a spanned set.  I used the example of a clients RAID that contained 3 36 GB SCSI drives. In a standard set each one of the drives would use one partiton for the entire drive and then the set would be mounted... 

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When good RAIDs Go Bad, A Technicians Worst Nightmare

The next machine with a bad hard drive was my server. This server has been running as a server in our home for about 8 years. HAH! Now that is not to say that we haven’t done upgrades, because we have. We have always kept the “data” area of the... 

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Recovering a Spanned RAID Set Without RAID Software

  Recently it was my displeasure to work on a three drive spanned set for NT 4.0.  The set was soft configured so when the boot drive went down, with all of the configuration data for the RAID on it, the RAID would not mount.  In addition to that,... 

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Use Bad Block Frequency to determine RAID 5 stale drive

We have been discussing the love affair I have with stale drives in a RAID five array and how best to determine if in fact one exists. I explained how the NTFS file system data is normally laid out and the fact the old and new data, as well as how... 

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Determining a Stale Hard Drive in Most RAIDs

  In my last installment I covered two of the three reasons why we do a parity check.  First we want to make sure that we do not have a stale hard drive in the array.  Although I did not cover how one determines if in fact a stale hard drive exists,... 

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Analyzing RAID parity

Last time I discussed how to find the RAID data offset for a SNAP OS 4.x RAID handler. To put it briefly it was just a simple matter of finding Cylinder Group zero on the first drive in the array and back tracking 48 sectors. Once the RAID data offset... 

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Check Your RAID Consistency Before A Rebuild

Over the years one of the most consistent problems with RAID recovery is the rebuild. I would estimate that nearly 40 percent of the RAIDs that we cannot recover are due exclusively to the fact that a technician executed a rebuild before verifying the... 

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RAID Configuration and Parity Check

The function set for the inaugural offering of RAID Diagnostic Toolkit is very basic. This post will explain how to choose a set of ’streams’ to build a ‘RAID set’. Initially the software does not have any options for stripe size,... 

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RAID Five Steps to recovering your data

     In one of my articles I tried to define the mathematics of a RAID 5 stripe and how it relates to data recovery.  Using the eXclusive ORing truth table we can continue to run the array even when one drive has dropped out of the array.  This... 

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RAID Data Recovery Overview

We have been getting a lot of calls about RAID data recovery lately. As more and more computer manufacturers utilize RAID systems in home computers, RAID failures rise exponentially. It used to be that RAID data recovery calls that we received were large... 

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RAID Data Recovery Variables

The first rule of RAID data recovery is “due no harm”.  In fact that is DTI’s rule on all types of hard drive recovery, from laptop disk repair to multi drive arrays. Work should never be performed directly on media that stored the... 

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