Striped RAID Problems Wimbledon

“Extremely pleased with the work done returning some important data from our failed server. Not sure why nobody noticed that one of the drives in the mirror had failed a couple of months ago. Thanks again, as we would have lost a huge contract without these files.”

Adil Ray, Notting Hill

A Dell server was delivered to our laboratory in Fleet Street London from Notting Hill. An examination of the server revealed it to contain a pair of 2TB Seagate hard disk drives. When our hardware data recovery engineers examined the drives they found that one of them had suffering a catastrophic read/write head failure while the other drive had suffered a controller board failure. These failures were probably as a result of a build of heat, largely due to a couple of the fans not working properly, in particular one responsible for ensuring airflow across the hard disk drives.

Our hardware data recovery specialists were able to overcome the controller board issue, using donor parts. A further examination of the drive which had suffered the read/write head failure, revealed that the motor spindle had failed. This may have contributed to the read/write heads coming into contact wth the platters, which caused severe damage to large areas of the platters. Our hardware data recovery engineers concentrated their work on the other drive, securing a sector-by-sector copy of the drive, encountering no unreadable bad sectors during the process, although the transfer speed fluctuated a lot, indicating the health of the drive was poor.

An examination of the image of this drive revealed it to a single 2TB NTFS data volume. The file system was examined to determine when the file system was last accessed, which revealed it to that day, which meant the other drive was not required. Approximately 940GB of data consisting was found to be recoverable consisting of operating system files, program files, scanned images, photos, videos and most importantly the office documents containing several presentations and other data desperately required. This data was returned to the customer within 24 hours of the server arriving at our laboratory.

Comments are closed