Job log · NAS & RAID sets · ADR-2025-3192
The Machine Had Failed. The Array Had Not.
They had a lab full of people waiting and a single workstation that wouldn't turn on. A genetics department, a Dell T7910, and a device that will not boot due, it is believed, to a motherboard problem
. Behind that device sat a 3TB RAID array containing the team’s active files. The only thing they wanted to know was whether they could recover the data from the 3TB RAID array
without the workstation. They hadn’t touched the disks and they hadn’t allowed anything to rebuild. Those two decisions meant more to this project than everything we did after that.
Same story on yours? Tell us what it does — the look is free.
0203 0868633
What failed, and why.
Mainboards and arrays live together in the same metal box but are otherwise unrelated. Mainboards are machines that read and arrays are devices that hold. If/when the reader dies, the storage continues and there is no mechanism whereby a failing mainboard can reach out and alter information stored on a platter. We need to say this clearly since, in an office environment, the tendency is to think of the entire tower as one faulty unit and therefore price a recovery as though the array also failed. The true risks are those that occur immediately thereafter: placing the individual members into a second machine to determine whether they function, allowing a controller to decide the set needs initialising, or accepting an offered rebuild from a card that has never seen these members before. Any of these actions writes to members that were perfectly readable an hour earlier. Anything with an additional member opens at £500 + VAT on the published bands. Assessments prior to action are at no cost.
What the bench did with it.
The order of the job →| Equipment used | Its work on this job | The reason for it |
|---|---|---|
| PC-3000 Express | Profiled each member independently of the rest before considering the set as a whole. | Reads the health that a controller only gives as a summary, and has the ability to read this information without the array's card in the way. |
| Atola TaskForce 2 | Each member was copied simultaneously behind write blockers rather than sequentially and awaiting completion of each previous member. | Copies every member of a set at once, so none sit waiting for another |
| UFS Explorer RAID Recovery | Member order and stripe geometry were read from each disk and then a volume created from the copies. | Recovers the stripe order, then reverse engineers the volume manager the NAS layered above it |
What the bench did with it.
Order recorded, then copies before anything else
The workstation arrived with all its members still installed in their respective bays. In sequence, each was removed, labelled with the bay it originally occupied and placed upon an imaging device. None of the members was required to present a volume at that time and none was installed in another machine to check whether it would operate. A set can only be considered as sound as its weakest copy, thus the initial step involved creating copies of each member and subsequently analysing those copies.
What each member had to say for itself
The health status of each disk was determined directly from the disks themselves as opposed to relying on the summary provided by the controller responsible for managing them. This distinction is important when dealing with an array because a control card reports that either a member is operational or failed with no intermediate states. However, each disk provides details regarding sectors it has had to work at, reset events it has encountered and hours of operation. All of the members responded correctly. The department had assumed that the array was intact. For once, this assumption proved correct.
The geometry comes off the members
No assumptions were made concerning how this particular controller normally organises its members. Instead, member order, stripe width and parity rotation were worked out from the self-reporting information embedded within each disk, and a volume was then created from the copies using those figures. At that point, power ceased being drawn from the original devices. All subsequent activity including file system examination, folder analysis and validation occurred using copies.
What went home.
The volume mounted successfully, was compared folder by folder against existing contents and all working files were restored to fresh media. The T7910 workstation was never repaired nor required to be; whether it will ever boot again is a question for somebody else. No data was written to any member, therefore the array that was delivered is the same array they still have. Work on a multi-disk box starts at £500 + VAT, and they had that figure in writing before a disk left its bay.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Other RAID & NAS work on the log.
Yours doing something similar? Power it down first.
Published prices are fixed. Memory cards and USB sticks are £250 + VAT. Any stand-alone drive is £300 + VAT. Drive configurations containing multiple disks (RAID, NAS or server) start at £500 + VAT. First assessments are always complimentary. Thereafter, data recovery charges are also fixed in advance and in writing, so you'll always know how much you owe before paying any money. Shut it down, get a quote first (by phone or with the form), then send it in or drop it off at our Guildford intake laboratory, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm (no appointment needed). On most jobs you only pay if we recover your data.