Hard drive recovery
 

Guys

Anyone recommend a good company that can recover hard drives that have had failure
The drive is part of a raid zero logical volume.

Was gonna say I did it myself with free software but just googled the RAID bit, mine was just a 1TB USB drive.

Think your a bit ahead of me on your knowledge

Is budget a consideration here, and how important is it to get the data back? Have to ask, as most outfits will typically charge double or more to recover a RAID0 drive than what they would for an ordinary drive.

Two Things

Can the raid not rebuld the array... was it 100% mirror across 2 drives, or was it striped accross several drives?


2nd as a last resort, you could try puran file recovery,

its supposed to recover raid drives..... takes fooofin ages, and when i tried, it got very little back, i cut my losses on 1 month worth of Photo's and restored from a pc backup


Mart

Unfortunately for Urban, RAID0 is the non-mirrored, non-fault tolerant variety, so a rebuild of the actual data using the array itself is definitely a non-starter (we probably wouldn't be reading this thread, if it was mirrored RAID).

Google tells me others in the same position have had varying degrees of success using home-run free and/or commercial tools, but it all depends on the state of the failed drive, the user's tech savvy and access to other systems, but also their willingness to risk further decreasing the chances of recovering the data by keeping the drive running while they familiarize themselves with the workings of the recovery software.

Spot on, we do data recovery for our customers and have links to the specialists in this field. If your budget is not a few hundred quid you are best off playing around with free/cheap software on another RAID volume you have built just for test purposes, then trying it for real.

Be advised, the more work you do on a knackered drive, the more expensive the recovery will be, and the less you will get back.

PM me if you wish, we will need as much specifics as you can get. Size, type, make of drive, model number, what type of partition was on the drive and the nature of the failure as best as you can describe.

EDIT:

As a separate topic of conversation, and please forgive me for bringing it up at this point, you should never ever find yourself in a situation like this. RAID 0 is not something to be messing around with. If you have the budget for multi drive performance, but none for backups, you would be far far better just running on a single drive and have the other as a backup (not even RAID 1). By backup, I mean an external hard drive that is taken offsite.

Data integrity is far more important than performance. Sorry to bring that up now, but if you need to talk to someone on how to avoid this ever happening again please take this opportunity before its too late again.

http://www.krollontrack.co.uk/data-recovery/

these guys are very good, but are exensive, at the end f the day, it depends how valuable the data is...

Exactly :)

I shall

Expensive - fcuk, that's an understatement.
£600 notes to diagnose for a start.


BY the way all, the underlying operating system here is unix if that makes any difference.
Old legacy stuff, not exactly life threatening if it is lost as its just an inconvenience to rebuild the damn thing.

HAHA yeah last time we used them i think it was around £1200 all in for the recovery, but for our customer it was essential....

THe fellow I talked with yesterday basically said this

£600 + VAT for to diagnose (Payable in advance by credit card)
Then £1500 to £2700 for recovery

Diagnosis - money for old rope I say

Sir - your hard drive is fcuked, would you like it back, or shall I chuck it in the bin, and thanks for the £600 fine British pounds.

How has the drive failed? Device electronics given up, can you hear the platter spinning? Heads still moving etc

What file system is in use? EXT3? EXT4?

TestDisk and PhotoRec are two very good recovery tools for unix / linux drives, both are free as far as I can recall. TestDisk offers deep recovery options recover backup superblocks etc whereas PhotoRec (despite its name, it is not limited to photos) will let you bring up your source drive in RO mode and allow you to find files on the drive and migrate them to the safety of another volume. Both are command line tools, have a read at the relevant wiki content before you have a run at it.

Recuva is very good, but I dont think it supports UFS.

You know Dave, I don't know how it has failed just yet.
Its in air conditioned room with a bunch of other servers, so its too noisy to hear.
I need to pull it from the rack and take it to a quiet room.

Proper diagnostics to see what data can be recovered is a highly skilled time consuming process. Yes, there are those out there that will take your eyes out and do nothing for you.

In my opinion Kroll are not one of them. They are pricey, but they are also known to provide good results. Given they are partly my competition, please take my advice seriously. They are worth the money if your data is worth that kind of money to you.

There are cheaper alternatives, probably half the price. But, they are not generally quite as good. I can help you for around half that estimated price, but just as they said to you, there are no guarantees with data recovery.

From what you have said, you are probably going to have a go yourself to recover, see what you get and put the rest down to experience. Good backup software is not nearly as costly. Good software starts with the like of things along the lines of SyncBack SE / Pro from 2BrightSparks. Costs no more than £50 for a lifetime license for even the Pro version.

Sorry I cannot provide you better news.

I have recovered a "failed" drive by simply replacing the electronic pcb controller board

if the physical platters that hold the 1 and 0's that represent your data have disintegrated then you you are pretty much fvcked -- short of contacting the American NSA

raid is obviously more complicated, but the principle is the same - it is either a controller/motor problem or a "data" problem

I had a spindle failure, so could not use anything myself, had to use a specialist company. Cost me £400, but considering it had 10 years of digital pics on it, it was worth it (obviously being an IT professional I hadn't taken a backup :o )

I'll try and dig out their details for you, it was 3 years ago.

Geezer

I think it was Fields Data Recovery.

Geezer

No way, I reckon I need an adult for that job :lol1: