As crucial as post-failure treatment applies to individual hard drive data recovery; it is even more critical with multiple physical disks etc. there are so many things that can go wrong. In most cases, non-expert manipulation, in any fashion, makes the RAID recovery an awful lot more difficult – if not impossible.
Likelihood of Recovery - RAID / NAS
It is really important to maintain the sequence of the drives in the RAID Array. Also, where more than one drive in the RAID Array has failed knowing which drive failed last can often be a majot advantage when embarking on RAID data recovery task. It goes without saying that, if at all possible, the disks and the RAID controller should be left in the host system and shipped to us in this format.
In general, any of the following being performed outisde a data recovery environment can have a severe impact on the RAID data recovery:
- changing the sequence of the disks
- replacing and re-initialising disks
- interfering, in any way, with automatic array re-build
- writing data onto existing array e.g. Operating System reload, data restore etc.
- running “data recovery” utilities download from the internet
- running in-built Operating System disk repair / maintenance utilities.
A RAID storage system is a very complicated system requiring an exact, conservative RAID data recovery procedure – non-expert attempts at RAID recovery usually make things significantly worse. If in doubt call us first!