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
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 … [Read more...]
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, … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 hold in you hand) hard drive put … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 that the old and new data, as well as … [Read more...]
 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 … [Read more...]
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, raid type, meta … [Read more...]