5 Things NOT To Do If Your RAID or Server Fails

RAID servers distribute their data across a number of hard disks. It is therefore very important that any data loss situation is dealt with correctly.
Inexperienced ‘specialists’ will often inadvertently destroy recoverable data because they lack the experience to recover these complex systems correctly.

Servers and RAID arrays often store lots of important data. The server may be a large RAID 5 system that holds lots of important company files and databases or it may be a home NAS server that contains equally important personal and family data.

These systems fail infrequently, but when they do it’s imperative that the correct action is taken in order to access the system and recover the data. This is often the most important part of the entire process and doing it wrongly will lead to the permanent loss of data that can no longer be retrieved.

What Makes Recovering RAID Data So Difficult ?

Typically the data you wish to recover will be written across all the disks that make up the RAID array. From a data recovery angle, this typically means that complete individual files will not exist on any one disk, but rather segments of each file will be distributed across the whole RAID array. It’s therefore pointless (unless you are trying to recover data from a mirrored raid [RAID 1]) to attempt to isolate a single drive from the array and recover that.

5 Golden Rules of RAID Data Recovery

DO NOT change the disk order of the array: It’s very important not to change the order of the disks in the RAID array. Infact, unless you have a physical problem with one or more disks in the array, you shouldn’t need to remove them from the server. If you do remove them, it is vitally important that you put them back in the same order. Under no circumstances should you attempt to recover the data from a RAID array if the drive order has been compromised. You run an extremely high risk of losing all the data.
DO NOT run disk checking software on the array: Scandisk and Chkdsk are programs that often run automatically if a problem with the filesystem is detected. Unfortunately, these programs are unable to deal with physical damage to hard disks, and even more unfortunately, rather than terminate, they will carry on and attempt to fix any problems. For further information, please read our page detailing why it’s not a good idea to run scandisk / chkdsk on raid arrays.
DO NOT continue to run the system if one or more of the hard disks appear faulty: If the RAID / SCSI BIOS reports that one or more drives are not functioning correctly, you may have a physical drive problem. Sometimes however, the BIOS will indicate that drives are offline not because of a physical disk problem, but rather because of a RAID configuration problem.
DO NOT re-configure the RAID: If there does not appear to be a problem with the RAID configuration, there is no need to write any new configuration data. If the configuration information has been lost or corrupted it’s imperative that the RAID is re-configured correctly.
DO NOT rebuild the RAID: If any of the points above apply or you are uncertain about the viability of your data, DO NOT REBUILD THE RAID. If any of the hard drives that make up the RAID have bad sectors DO NOT REBUILD THE RAID – attempting to rebuild a RAID that has drives with bad sectors will cause the whole rebuild process to fail and lead to a significant amount of data loss.

Data Clinic Reviews

Data Clinic Ltd

4.5

Jacob Greenwood

14:38 30 Mar 18

5* customer service! Recovered my father's book from an old drive, also retrieved some long forgotten about photos. Simply cant put a price on something like that.

Jarek Roover

12:21 30 Jul 18

Go there if you lost your data

Tony Cowgill

15:56 10 Apr 13

We've used Data Clinic twice now - once for my son's laptop which held all his University work and suddenly seemed to just die, that was recovered with ease. And then secondly in connection with work when our office computer system backups were somehow corrupted. These people really know their stuff - they are very helpful and professional and quick! Thanks so much for everything.

Rob Deighton

11:33 09 Dec 16

Happy to recommend Data Clinic to anybody that suffered Data Loss on storage Media. The guys were extremely helpful and knowledgeable and made the recovery of our valuable data a stress free experience.

George Thorpe

12:19 20 Feb 14

My company provides IT support to approximately 60 Yorkshire based companies ranging from small 10-15 users up to Enterprise sized organizations. Due to disk failure a client recently lost their entire database. We contacted Data Clinic and within hours a representative was onsite, several hours later the drive was returned, again in person by Data Clinic Manchester. I would not hesitate contacting them again, outstanding service in a market that can mean life or death to a business. 10 stars if there was an option!

Kieran Collins

21:02 25 Oct 18

Fantastic. Could not fault them at all, Brilliant, 10 year old iMac full of data and they had the data back to me in 72 hours. Communication via e-mail was fast, clear and superb.

David Tett

14:36 24 Aug 18

Sent them a 4tb WD Red hard drive to recover. They quoted me £588 incl VAT and recovery media. I was a bit sceptical so I asked for it to be returned. First they sent me the wrong hard drive (a 500GB WD Blue). Not too careful about data protection then. When I eventually got the drive back it had been totally stripped and outer casing binned (would have been nice to know about this beforehand). I decided to send it to Curry's PC World. They quoted £90 + recovery media. All data recovered and both hard drives returned within a week. What more is there to say.

Elle Sweet

22:12 20 Aug 18

Awful communication, I was constantly chasing them for updates on my device. My device was with them days before work was started on it. The data this company couldn’t retrieve was later retrieve by Apple. Waste of a £110.

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