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Data Recovery from Damaged RAID
Recovering data from failed RAID 5 array
In most cases of RAID 5 failure, all data is recoverable if you act
swiftly and take care of a few things. The following fixes can help:- As a first step shut the PC down. That’s right, just stop working on it and shut it down. The reason behind it is that while 2 of the RAID disks have already gone (leading to the failure), your RAID controller might still be working and might perform writes on the other drives causing them to fail too. So until you know better, just shut down the PC.
- Arrange the necessary hardware and
software for performing a complete RAID recovery in one shot without any
interruptions. You’ll need:
- A spare PC or external storage (preferably NAS) with enough space as the total size of the original RAID disks.
- A UPS that can power your PC, the spare PC or NAS, a router and an HDD dock if required. No power interruptions should halt the recovery.
- An external HDD dock or another spare PC where your failed RAID disks will be attached to a bootable Windows OS for recovery.
- Trustworthy RAID 5 data recovery software like Stellar Phoenix RAID Data Recovery.
- Disassemble all the drives from the RAID array, and one by one check their physical integrity by running your drive vendor’s checking utilities. Here you need only to identify the failed drives and NOT attempt to repair them.
- Note down the numbers / names and other parameters of the disks that have failed.
- Now you need to run RAID recovery on the failed disks. To know the steps for that, proceed to the next section.
RAID 5 data recovery using Stellar software
Download, install and launch RAID data recovery (Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery – Technician). Then follow the below-mentioned steps:
- On the main screen, click on RAID Recovery.
- Select the RAID 5 tab and then select the hard drives to reconstruct RAID from the names/numbers of the failed disks you had noted earlier. Also provide other necessary parameters required by the software such as disk order, RAID Start Sector, Stripe/Block Size, Parity Order/Rotation, and Parity Repetition/Delay. If you’re not aware of any parameters, mention ‘Don’t know’ and check mark all possible options given in the drop down menu.
- Click on the ‘BUILD RAID’ button to see the probable RAID construction. Select the appropriate RAID construction and click on the ‘Show Volume List’ button to go to the data recovery window.
- The volumes in the chosen RAID construction get listed, which can be selected to perform various data recovery operations. Here if you want to select another RAID construction from the previous list, click the ‘Load Constructed RAID’ button. You can also create an altogether new RAID construction by clicking the ‘Reconstruct RAID’ button.
Final Words
Losing an entire RAID 5 array could be
disastrous. Don’t let yourself come to that stage. As a thumb rule,
always, ALWAYS backup your RAID arrays. Plus, keep reliable software
like Stellar Phoenix RAID Recovery handy for catastrophes.
