RAID 5 and RAID 0 Recovery Specialists
RAID 5 Recovery Specialists - Irvine
Some of our RAID recovery service highlights:
- In 1998 we developed CopyRAID, our own internal RAID data recovery software utility.
- We have since used CopyRAID to recover hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of raids.
- Recovered tiny 3 - 10gb RAIDS all the way up to monster 20 terabyte SAN arrays with 20 hard drives.
- Recovered RAIDS running on dedicated RAID controllers, like Adaptec, Dell, HP, Lacie, Snap.
- Recovered software RAIDS like Windows Dynamic Disk, Linux and those found in NAS boxes.
- Recovered RAIDS from Novell, Linux, Unix, Mac, Windows.
- Recovered RAIDS for IBM and States Attorney Generals.
- Recovered RAIDS after the major national data recovery companies have failed.
- 90% of our RAIDS come from other Data Recovery companies (What does that tell you?)
To be good at RAID data recovery you need a few characteristics:
- You need to understand RAID thoroughly.?You could say that we "wrote" the book on RAID, because we wrote our own software to recover RAID.
- Great analyst, dogged determined.A critical step in RAID recovery is the analyzing phase. In this phase we have to determine
- How many drives makeup the array? What kind of array?
- Whats the proper order? Which parity are the using left? right? symmetric?
- Are there any unused hot spares? or partially rebuilt spares? stale spares?
- Whats the blocksize of the stripe?
- Has 1 drive been dead for a long time and its information is stale (ie the array is degraded)?
- Have any drives been rebuilt or swapped?
- etc, etc, etc.
- Tools. Good analysis tools are essential. CopyRAID has a features to help us look at the data and figure out the configuration. Since we wrote it we can modify the code to help solve difficult configuration issues. Like writing special code to look for certain things. We sometimes write special code to merge data from the good areas of multiple damaged drives.
About 90% of the RAID recoveries we receive come from other Data Recovery companies. That tells you that most data recovery companies do not have the expertise required to analyze and recover a RAID. Frequently we get the RAID after the other company has had it for a week and can't figure it out.
Case study: RAID 1 - 2 x 160gb mirrored set: Recently another Data Recovery company brought in a RAID. The customer had reinitialized it, reformatted it and then installed a fresh copy of windows - overwriting 7 gb of a 160 gb raid. The company that brought it to me was out of time - they had had it for 1 week, the customer was demanding it back and all they had been able to recover so far was some small file fragments. We analyzed it, figured it out, and recovered it the very next day. They got back 99% of their data, with names and folders - just about perfect - despite their effort to wreck it.
Case study: RAID 5 - 4 x 1 terabyte. Data recovery company brought in a RAID 5 that they had for a few weeks with no luck. We analyzed it. It appeared to be a RAID 5. We determined the order and parity, everything confirmed. We deraided to a new RAID array - but the files were all bad - nothing was lining up. We tried a few more copies using missing drive parity to regenerate the 'lost' data - still wasn't working. Finally after some extra in-depth analysis I figured out that it was a 3 drive raid with a spare - but the customer had rebuilt the drive as a 4 drive RAID 5. So it looked like a RAID 5, in sync with no parity errors. Normally this would cause all kinds of damage. Lucky for the customer was the fact that he rebuilt the spare so he didn't cause any damage to his data. He just created a devious puzzle for the data recovery guy.
The permutations and possibilities are endless. It requires experience, and patience to analyze all the data and figure out what went wrong, in what order and how to fix it. You have to like puzzles. soduko anyone?