RAID Support During Lock Down
A customer contacted our help line to report that he has a server with three hard drives configured in a RAID array that had failed. His usual IT support was not available and he could not find alternative local support to attend his offices.
In desperation he had tried a few things himself without success then called our RAID Emergency Help Desk to assist him reconstruct his data and rebuild his server. The server had been used to run his company accounts and produce his tax returns over a number of years.
Our Emergency RAID support team called the customer and confirmed; that two Western Digital 1.5 TB drives had been setup in a RAID 1 configuration and that the other hard drive had the server OS installed. The RAID setup was enabled in BIOS using an Intel S3420GPLC server board. The server was running Small Business Server (SBS 2008) and the RAID set in question was acting as storage and backup for his accounts software. This small business server set-up had reached its end of life support and the customer was attempting to update it. In attempting the update the customer had disconnected the two drives from the server board and then rebooted in order to re-install the new OS. Once the new OS was installed the other two drives were reconnected and the server restarted. At this point the customer had noticed an error report and the server and his data were no longer available.
RAID Small Business Server
RAID 1 Overview
A RAID 1 system array is designed to easily recover from a single disk failure. With RAID 1 disk arrays there is a built in failover and they will continue to provide adequate service with a single disk failure. With a single disk failure the RAID controller software will output an alert with the ID of the failed drive. In normal operation all that is needed for the user to physically replace the failed drive with a new compatible hard drive and then enter the RAID configuration panel and select the rebuild option. A rebuild will then take place and usually will take an extended period.
By removing the hard drives and attempting to update the OS the customer had unfortunately introduced a few additional problems with the RAID 1 system could not recover from.
In this case the best way forward was to advise that he firstly make separate images (clone) of the two drives. In this way the customer would preserve his original data and proceed “risk free” in diagnosing and resolving underlying problems that may have prevented the system from rebuilding.
Datlabs advise that you never work on the original drives in a failed RAID array. Changes to system data can adversely affect the possibility of a successfully rebuild and also stress hard drives in the array that are susceptible to fail.
When a hard drive in a RAID array goes offline the workload placed on the remaining operational drives naturally becomes greater as they have to perform additional tasks. It is only a matter of time before the still-working hard drive/s are going to suffer the same fate. If that happens, attempts at data recovery will become more difficult (if not impossible) to accomplish. Always work with disk images; Typically use products such as Clonezilla, Acronis Trueimage, Norton Ghost to create your drive images.
Working with the Imaged Hard Drives from the RAID.
From the imaged hard drives you can determine if any underlying problems have contributed to the RAID failure and prevented a normal rebuild operation. We often notice high bad sector counts with drives that have dropped out of a RAID array particularly with hard drives that have been in operation for a long time such as in this system. You can also determine the hard drive ID and its order within the array which will assist in attempting a rebuild.
Recovering RAID data using the hard drive images.
It is imperative that you first attempt to rescue the data from a failed RAID array before moving on and attempting any system rebuild operations.
Data Recovery can be achieved using the hard drive images you have created. Connect the imaged member disks to a RAID controller capable of working with separate disks.
Here at Datlabs we use R Studio to rescue data from any simple RAID set-up. R Studio automatically detects system parameters for any file system and restore access to data by creating a virtual RAID and reconstructing a valid data set from the constituent hard disk drives. Using R Studio you can open the volume and preview some of the files to verify a correct rebuild has been detected. Once verified files and folders can then be transferred to another hard drive ready to be restored.
For more complex RAID Array configurations Datlabs Emergency RAID Recovery team are experts in determining RAID parameters, file system features and other technical detail necessary to rebuild any RAID configured server.
R Studio RAID Parameters
RAID Diagnosis and Support Over The Internet
In some cases we can offer remote RAID support that removes the immediate need to ship damaged hard drives or computers via courier. Once our technical team have access to your computer they can perform an initial inspection and assessment.
