Is Zar the new name for iRecover?

[petestrash]

Looking at the screen shots Zar looks like iRecover and Irecover seems to have disappeared.

Is there there any additional functionality?

Peter.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

As far as I know, iRecover is still in good shape at http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/

There is certain additional functionality in iRecover, mostly concerning bootable CD operations.

[petestrash]

Ok, thanks.

The diydatarecovery/ (http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/) website and forums were down most of last week, so thought they had disappeared.

I have had trouble recovering a 4 drive raid5 array with iRecover, Is Zar any better at handling Raid arrays.

Peter.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

There is certain difference but I cannot predict if it will turn out better or worse in your specific case.
However, after a little checking there, I think that right now we are, sort of, in better position to try on your problem.

What the problem is exactly?
Also while we are at it
How many drives and what sizes?
You said RAID5, all drives OK or is one missing?

[petestrash]

Thanks,

I have a PC running Windows XP Media centre 2005 which has 4 x 400GB SATA drives that formed a raid 5 array controlled by an Intel ICH8 chipset on the Motherboard. It contained about 700Gb of files. I thought this was a fairly safe option because if one drive failed the array would rebuild onto the remaining 3 drives. I did not anticipate what actually happened though.

One day I found the PC frozen with a blue screen of death showing. After reboot the array no longer existed and thus the PC would not boot.

I used the bios to re-enable the array (which I probably should not have), this brought up a working array which was empty and needed formatting.

At this stage I bought another Harddrive and installed WIn XP MCE on it so no further damage would be done to the raid array.

So, I am looking for a product that will help me try and recover my raid5 array.

I have tried the demo version of iRecover and have made postings about the issue to thier support forum (http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1148).

I have found some software which has been able to recover small files that were not striped across multiple drives, but the files I am really after are much larger and not found by these programs.

Regards,

Peter.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

So get the latest ZAR at
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/zar-83-030.exe
and retry with it. There is some difference in processing (between these versions), so I need a baseline which I can use. Start ZAR, go to "Advanced Configuration", and under "Logging" change "Normal logging" to "Extended logging - for debug purposes". If it hangs, I need the last lines of the log file (C:\Porgram Files\ZAR\logfile.txt) to see what it was doing.

And I send you some additional info with a private message.

[petestrash]

Thanks I will install as described.

I have just purchased a new quad core cpu Q6600 to replace this machines current core duo, do you think it would be beneficial to install this first.

Also It currently has 2GB of memory and I have another 2 spare 1gb sticks. Do you think it would help speed up processing.

Peter.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

I do not think you get any dramatic increase from that. We can only use 2GB max, and as far as CPUs are concerned, I'd say one CPU per two disks is enough - you will be disk-bound most of the time.

[petestrash]

Thanks,

Running the scan now.

Prescan only used 60% cpu, but identifing data is averaging around 120%.

No bad sectors shown.

I'll hold off with the upgrades not to confuse things.

Thanks,

Peter.

[petestrash]

Zar froze at some point, and when returning from screensaver the Zar window was blank and after leaving for an hour still did not poulate with details.

XP showed it as not responding.

Stangely no log file in the Zar directory.

I don't know if Zar caused it or just a general XP issue, the rest of the machine seemed fine.

The last I saw was about 7% though validiation.

I'll launch again and see what happens.

Peter.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

7% through validation means it already rebuilt the RAID and then you instructed it to process the volume. After that, it processed the volume to the point where folder tree is displayed, and then locked up.

If the above is correct, I suggest you check the hardware. The events started with the BSOD, cause unknown, and then ZAR (which puts massive loads onto the machine) locks up where it should not, in a way it should not. In most cases, this is indicative of some sort of a hardware problem. I suggest you start with RAM test (with GoldMemory or DocMemory). If it possible to move drives to another machine and run from there, do it (because if the memory is fine, then mainboard controllers/buses become suspect).

[petestrash]

I did save the scan before validation started. But if I try to load it I get an error message saying it is unable to match the device and again Zar freezes.

I have not had another blue screen event (touch wood) since the array was lost almost 2 years ago.

I had used si-soft's Sandra to run tests on both memory and drives/controllers which did not reveal any issues.

I can try the suggested GoldMemory or DocMemory though.

As far as moving the drives goes, does it matter if the new machine has a different chipset or doesn't support raid at all.

Peter.

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Any machine which can read all drives separately and simultaneously will do. You do not need RAID (you rather need separate drives), and chipset does not matter.