Recover from RAID5 Enclosure ?

[dubster]

Hi My startech RAID 5 Enclosure has failed in some way.
None of the drives are showing as having failed, and being as they are 4 drives less than 3 months old, I would hope not.

Suddenly the enclosure drive shows up in Windows as needing formatting.

Maybe the ESata card failed, so I connected it via USB and it still shows as needing formatting now.

I believe the data must still be there, and I'm hoping ZAR will allow me to recover it.

Can you tell me if it will let me recover from a RAID5 which is presented as 1 drive instead of 4 ?

Thanks

S

[Alexey V. Gubin]

In your situation there are two possibilities,
1. filesystem issue (with RAID OK)
2. RAID issue

You first try to scan it as if it was a regular monolithic disk. This would take care of a possible filesystem problem. If no good recovery is achieved, get the drives out of enclosure, connect to 4x desktop SATA ports, and do a RAID recovery with ZAR. Do not forget to
1. label drives so you can put them back as they were
2. not to turn on the enclosure while there are no drives in it.

[dubster]

Ok so I'm at the point where I've now put the 4 drives in the PC to try and recover, so I'm going for that option and the current operation is scanning disks RAID 5 (0%).

At the bottom of the screen it says 65 MB/sec, however it says 0 seeks/sec - is the 0 seeks an issue as the 0% hasn't changed since it started ?

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Looks pretty normal to me. "Seek" is registered when a non-sequential read is requested. There are significant parts in the process when there are no seeks.

[dubster]

Ok well it took about 60 hours to get to the point where a virtual raid was built.

Another 10 hours for the quick scan.

Just started the full scan.

It's still saying the file system is unknown, rather than NTFS, and there are a number of blue data fragment dots and very few yellow file system ones.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed it's not gonna be another 60 hours.

Any of this sound good/bad ?

[Alexey V. Gubin]

Unknown filesystem is OK at this stage.
now, do you expect NTFS in there, I found it disturbing that it reversed from quick scan to full scan. Normally on NTFS, there are two passes - Quick Prescan and then Quick Scan. If that did not produce enough data, it falls back to Full Scan. Which should not happen on NTFS.

if it fails eventaully, email me a log file, c:\program files\zar\logfile.txt to development@z-a-recovery.com

[dubster]

Yeah I definitely formatted it as NTFS.

Thanks Alexey, I'll drop you a log file if I have no joy.

Scott