Degraded for months with nobody the wiser, and then the second disk goes twenty minutes into a rebuild. Or the controller failed with the only copy of the configuration inside it. RAID data recovery services are weekly trade here, not an occasional adventure. Sets at 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 arrive from servers, from workstations, from NAS boxes. Everything is imaged before anything is attempted, then the volume is built again in software. Companies that cannot trade go first.
Every raid array job is diagnosed free. The fixed figure reaches you in writing first, before any tools come out.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
First job on any raid array is matching the symptom to the fault. Twenty-odd years in, these twenty-five cover nearly every one that reaches this bench.
Redundancy covered the first failure. Then the rebuild finishes off a second, tired disk. Array recovery has one defining catastrophe and that is it, and it also happens to be our steadiest arrival.
A rebuild abandoned halfway poisons the very parity it was depending on to finish. How far that damage reaches gets charted from images before anybody touches a structure.
A controller takes its configuration to the grave with it. Geometry gets re-derived straight from the member disks, with no replacement card involved and no vendor utilities anywhere near the job.
Push months-old data back into a working set and the file system tears along the seam where those two versions disagree. Unpicked at image level, where a disagreement can be studied instead of compounded.
Somebody builds a fresh configuration over the top of a live one. Catch that initialisation early enough and a surprising share of whatever lay beneath comes through it.
A power event drops multiple members simultaneously. Every disk receives individual repair and an image of its own before group arithmetic is permitted to begin.
Entire banks appear to die together when the real culprit is chassis wiring. Diagnosis comes before alarm here, and it usually turns out to be the cheaper order of work as well.
The array arithmetic checks out perfectly, and the NTFS or ext4 riding on top of it is in pieces. Rebuilding at parser level is what brings that one home.
Removed by mistake, and recoverable quickly for as long as the blocks it described go unwritten. Time is the only genuine enemy there, and it is not a patient one.
A flat cache battery plus an outage leaves the write hole open and the pair out of step with each other. Reconciled from images, where a wrong assumption costs nothing at all.
H710s and P420s expire still holding a definition nobody ever wrote down. The layout gets lifted off the member disks, and nobody has to stage the replacement-card pantomime.
Whichever disk has dead heads goes first to the clean bench, then rejoins the imaging queue. Nothing proceeds until it does, because a set is never more complete than its worst member.
Matched disks bought together for one small-business set wear at very similar rates. Imaging in parallel gets ahead of the second failure, and getting ahead of it is the whole game.
mdadm superblocks and Storage Spaces metadata disappear with remarkably little provocation. Both get rebuilt from the raw members, slowly, piece by piece, from images.
Any member remapping sectors daily is dying by degrees rather than in one go, and failure by degrees still ends somewhere. Image in time and the whole set lives. Image late and some of it will not.
Lose both halves of a single mirror inside a RAID 10 and the design, as written, is beaten. Lab imaging can frequently raise one of those halves far enough to complete the stripe. That is where theory and practice go their separate ways.
One hopeful click against stale metadata scrambles the entire set. The genuine layout gets read back off the member disks, which kept honest records the entire time.
A member with no error-recovery limit gets ejected under load for spending too long on a single bad sector. Imaged on hardware willing to wait, then reassembled from the copies.
Pool metadata goes missing from hypervisor builds after a power cut. Transaction history then gets walked backwards from complete member images until something consistent turns up.
Two modules striped for benchmark figures, no parity anywhere in the design, and one module now dead. Each module is recovered as a full NVMe case, and the stripe is then sewn back together out of the images.
The alert emails were going to an address nobody read after a member of staff left. That array has run on borrowed redundancy for six months, and the day the second disk goes is the day it comes to light. Everything gets imaged, the disk the controller still calls healthy included.
Capacities that look identical differ by a few thousand sectors from one model or generation to the next. The controller rejects the replacement, somebody clears the configuration so it will accept one, and now two problems exist where there was one. Work at image level and that size difference stops meaning anything.
Disks taken out of an older server and reused still carry that server's array signatures. Show both sets to a controller and it makes decisions nobody asked for. We establish the genuine layout from the data itself, not from whichever set of metadata shouted loudest.
JBOD and spanned sets carry no redundancy whatsoever. They write across the disks in sequence and nothing more. Lose one and the file system has a hole through the middle. Files that sat wholly on the surviving members come back intact, and normally that is more of them than owners expect.
Half of a RAID 1 dropped out quietly and the pair ran on with no mirror at all. When the live disk eventually failed, that old half went back into service carrying a copy of everything from a year earlier. We image both, and the newer data gets recovered off the failed disk instead of being written off.
Nobody theorises about layout until every disk has been duplicated end to end. After that, nothing of yours ever goes back into an array. All the deduction happens on the copies: which disk sat where, how big the stripe was, how the parity rotates, where the offset begins. Those answers are in the data, and the data is now safely duplicated. The volume then gets assembled in software and the file system read out of the assembly. A stale disk that fell out of a RAID 5 half a year ago and was never reported. Two casualties in a RAID 6. Nested 10s. A controller that has forgotten its own settings. All routine. And if the card itself is what failed, there is no point chasing an identical replacement, because the layout lives in the disks rather than in the hardware that lost track of it.
Database failures produce the difficult calls. Disks that quit during a write. Transaction logs straddling the exact second everything stopped. A company standing idle behind all of it. This is handled as a discipline of its own. The array goes back together in software. Database files are then brought to a consistent state, the tables the business needs first taken first, so trading resumes long before the last terabyte is done. Three habits destroy more arrays than failed components ever have. Forcing an offline disk back online. Rebuilding onto a unit that is visibly on its way out. Letting one more person have one more go. When an array goes down: kill the power, label each disk with its bay, and ring before anything further is done. Scotland data recovery services get measured on a single question in a case like that, which is whether the firm is trading again by Monday.
One rule governs RAID work in this building. Image everything before anything is touched, and it has never once been waived for anybody:
Members get cloned simultaneously on dedicated hardware before anybody offers an opinion about layout. Every risk after that lands on copies. The originals sit still.
Stripe size, order, rotation and offset solved from the images, then the array stood up virtually. Geometry gets proved on the bench, never assumed from paperwork.
A dead member is a full mechanical job in its own right. Heads, boards, firmware, whatever it needs, until it images alongside the rest of the set.
Parity arithmetic and entropy tests have to agree with the solved layout before any file is lifted off it. Hunches do not survive that stage. That is what it is for.
NTFS and ReFS, ext4 and XFS, BTRFS and VMFS, all read natively, along with whichever virtual disks are parked on top.
Members cannot be written to during imaging. Whatever you posted comes home bit for bit, however the reconstruction turns out.
Card, chipset or software layer, geometry always lives on the member disks, and off those disks is where we read it back. A PERC or a Smart Array expires still clutching a definition nobody wrote down anywhere. Drives from a matched batch fail almost in formation. Desktop-grade members walk out on the set once the load is sustained. Three roads in, one ritual at the door: image every member side by side on the first day, reconstruct on the copies, retire the originals honourably at the finish. Engineering firms, survey outfits and design practices around Aberdeen run more of this kit than they realise, usually in a cupboard nobody opens from one year to the next.
Power the server down before a single disk moves. As each member comes out, mark it with its slot number, because reconstruction leans hard on knowing that order. Only the labelled disks travel; chassis and controller stay put. Photograph the bays as you found them; it repays the ten seconds it costs. Post the disks tracked and insured, or book a courier of your own. Collection is not something offered from here. Disks can also come in to reception at our Edinburgh location, open Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, roughly two and a half hours away down the A90.
Nearly everything on this bench came by tracked, insured post. It is the safest way to shift a failing drive, and a parcel handed in at a North-East post office is usually here the next working day.
Still bolted into a laptop, desktop, MacBook, iMac, server or CCTV / DVR box? Get the hard drive or SSD out first. The bare drive travels on its own. Stripping machines down is not a job this lab takes on. Flash soldered to a motherboard, as on Apple Silicon Macs and a couple of very thin laptops, is our one flat no: if it will not unbolt, it cannot be worked on.
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Address it for the attention of Edinburgh Data Recovery. From Aberdeen that is roughly 130 miles and two and a half hours down the A90, or next working day by tracked post if you would rather not make the run. You get a call the moment it is booked onto the bench.
Not sure what belongs in the box? Ring 0800 689 0668 before you tape it shut, or work through the free online diagnostic.
Free diagnosis, one number written down, no fix no fee on the bulk of jobs. Start online or phone it in.