Featured Article

RAID 5 Data Recovery

WD HARD DRIVES RAID 5:

I am working with an array which holds 8 WD hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration, and is used by the business to record transactions from a number of computers. The problems started with reports from the computer that the array was not working correctly. Sometimes it would be one of the drives disconnecting, another time it would be one of the drives failing completely. I had to try and do a rebuild in order to save most of the data, and so I replaced 2 of the disks in the array. This seemed fine for a couple of weeks, and data was once more being recorded to the server. The IT expert upstairs then the motherboard, increasing capacity, and did not power off the array or any of the connected computers during this flash. Ever since then, I have had a problem with mounting the array onto the server. The RAID 5 controller can be seen in BIOS and in device manager, but I am not able to see it in Windows 7 Drive management, and I can’t see any of the drives connected to the server. I have tried powering down and rebooting, and the array is still unmountable. I cannot think of any more tests to run.

HP SERVER RAID 5:

I am using an HP server which has an array connected to it. In the array are three drives, and I have also created a series of partitions over the array. One of the partitions contains 50gb of space, and is a RAID 0. The other partition has 250gb, and was until recently a RAID 5 setup. What has happened is that I have copied some files onto the second, larger partition, and then deleted the RAID 5 setup using some power tools, as I wanted to slightly change the way that the disks were performing. However, when I went to look in the volume, I can only see around 50gb of data, and no other parts of the volume. I decided that I needed to remove the RAID 0 too, and was then told that the RAID 0 has 250gb of memory, and that the files are corrupted. I have not been able to recover either of the partitions, which I hoped would solve this problem. It seems as though the RAID setups have somehow become swapped, and that the data which I copied to the second partition has gone.