Help: Data recovery!

[Paddy]

I have had a RAID controller die on me. I've managed to replace it, but it wants to reformat all the drives I've reinstalled the 2003 on a new disk and it will see the problem drive, but it reports it as unformated.

I need to try and get the data off the drive. It was my backup disk

Any suggestions would be appreciated. At the moment i'm not gonna touch it!

Cheers lads.

[Jammrock]

Where they dynamic or basic discs before the crash? In any event, you will need to open Disk Management and run (from right-click menu):

Import Foriegn Disk

..and if it still doesn't show up as working...

Repair

Forgot the exact option for RAIDs, but there is a repair RAID feature somewhere.

Jammrock

[Paddy]

I cant seem to see that option.

[Paddy]

I have just realised that my CV and all my work is on the backup disk!
I need to get that data back.

The drive is working.

[cjolley]

Looks like you need to run an unformat operation.
I had written about recovering a partion table, you you havn't lost yours.

Yours shows no file system, so I guess that means recovering the file system.
I've never done that with an NTFS format, but I have with NU on FAT32.

Not much help I guess, but surely there is a tool to recover an NTFS drive.

[Dilitante1]

what level raid and is the raid card the same type/model?

[Paddy]

RAID 1. No.

I have used the onboard SCSI controller to see the card.
My replacement RAID is an ATA RAID card.

I do have other SCSI RAID controllers but they *will* format the drive before you can use it so I dont dare put the disk near them.

[Dilitante1]

only item that i can find is this http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro...c12621675.mspx

[Paddy]

made some progress.

I ahve managed to use the ?faulty controller. I have reinstalled 2003 onto a different disk, and it is working.

In Disk management, I can see the drive, but now it shows unpartitioned space and no drive letter.

[Paddy]

R-STUDIO looks promising

[KvHagedorn]

How frustrating.. you got a nice scsi raid controller to prevent this very thing and here the controller mutinies! Guess one just can't win with bits and bytes.. they just wanna up and die one day.

I guess you could throw even more technology at the problem.. get 2 servers with raid and mirror them one to the other. hmm..

[Paddy]

Got it!
R-Studio is fantastic! It scans the physical drive and looks for anything.
It has found the partition and the files within. I am now restoring the data to a different drive.
Fingers crossed!

[Paddy]

YES!
R-STUDIO has worked! I needed to get the registered professional version, but it works.

I'm gonna add this to my collection. It is the best undelete program that I have ever used.

Problem solved!

[Paddy]

Right. All my critical data has been recovered.
My SQL database is corrupt and my mail server will need setting up again, but that's about it.
I've been doing this since 1800GMT and it's now 1140.

Work have jsut phoned and asked me to work tonight

I'll just set up the mail and then i'll pop off to bed.
Cheers for the help guys!

[Jammrock]

You don't click the partition, you click the drive. Two completely different set of options.