4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

My 4400 running guardian 4.106 went down over the holidays and i was unable to get support on the phone. I had already performed the repair in the recover console it would not finish a boot even loading the os over would not bring it up i was stuck in the recovery cycle. I made the mistake of putting the drives in my 4100 (snap OS) thinking the 4xxx series was the same OS that was my big mistake, as this messed up the mbr or INIT on the drives all of them. as they now wont even boot the 4400 and the 4400 does not even recognize the drives in the Bio's. When the drives were in recovery I checked the diagnostics and it did not to seem to be failing on any Raid errors, it seemed to be an OS problem or a hardware problem. Now i have the drives and I am wondering if any one has any ideas on how i might acomplish possible data recovery on them. As i dont want to spend the money to send them off to a data recovery center. After talking with adaptech they assured me that the 4100 wiped the mbr /init on the drives as it tried to mount them. If i build a machine with win2kpro then use a promise card to attach all the drives to can i then try to use some data recovery software to try to build a virtual raid and then repair the partitions and MBR with some amount of luck ? any one with knowledge of this type of scenrio please let me know any tips.

Xenoside

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

When you installed the drives in the 4100, it basicly wiped the MBR and installed the SnapOS from flashram and init the drives. Your only chance of recovery is with a recovery service.

Contact Snap-tech at douglas@frontlinedatarecovery.com he will be the cheapest of any recovery service.

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

yea i will check with him i contacted a few recovery places but was faced with 10,000 or more in cost to recover 4 drives in raid 5.

I could go for under a grand or so, and i dont expect perfection just ability to recover some stuff would be great.

I read alot of the threads where people were using utilities to rebuild the raid but were not able to then access the data to remove any of it, was there any improvments in this ?

Thanks for the reply you guys do a great service helping people with crappy snap servers

Adaptec, I think comes here to learn : ) lol

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

wonder if any one has tried
http://www.r-tt.com/

the R studio sounds like it might have some posibilities.

I saw that alot of people tried spin rite but it looks like it is limited on raid 5 work.

Xenoside

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

Spinrite only works on a failing single drive, does not and will not read a raid array, unless it's hardware based.

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

Roger that, I will do some attempted recoveries this week and keep the forum updated as to my progress or ultimate failure which ever the case may be.

xenoside

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

I would try to preserve the drives if the data is critical.

If you want to attempt recovery you need to do a RAW copy of the HD, or use frensic tools to copy the drive. Failure to preserve the data will futher hamper recovery, increasing the cost $$$$ of recovery.

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

Update : ) I am currently in the scan phase of the drives the software has been really easy to use and I did an preliminary scan and stopped it to see if it would see any files and it did find alot of data about 300 gig worth which is approximatly the amount of data that was on the system.

I am waiting now for the scan to complete to see at what extent the data will be recoverable and also to verify the integrity of that said Data.

I will keep you all posted and let you know the end results. As i know there are more than just me that have had raid/data corruption and needed to recover files off snap drives.

Xenoside

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

What are you using to recover the raid set with ?

There are proably more options for the Guardian OS, since it's using Linux (gentoo) vs the BSD that the Snap OS uses.

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

I am currently using R-studio I ran the scan process once but I think i had the drives out of order on the Raid array so i wnt back through and did a drive by drive plug in to verify the correct virutal raid build and I now have it correct and will run the scan again. it seems to take about 5 hours to scan about 384 gig

I am opptimistic that i might be able to recover some stuff but I am prepared if this fails I will be talking to "Snap-tech" to see if he can help me out. the mesures i am using with this software are non intrusive so the original drives stay intact and are not being written to.

The original scan found lots of files that were on the drives but it lost all the nameing convention many times this is expected in data recovery of raids, but in this isntance i think because the raid being out of order it was not able to pull enough data for the files as the files were not complete enough for recovery as i could recover them but they were not complete files and therfore garbage. I am hopeing on this next pass that i can get a better scan. although i might be faced with the same result.

Xenoside

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

one thing you guys might be able to help me with is I am asked about the "Raid block size" this program defaults to 64 KB I think this has alot to do with how the data is reconstructed any info would be helpfull once again this is guardian OS 4.106

Xenoside

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

Are you running this on the snap or did you move the drives to a pc?

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

My setup currently consists of a PC that is SATA boot winXPro, with a Promise 66 card in the PCI I have the drives set IDE1 Master Slave and IDE2 Master slave

then in the program you create a virtual Raid and then you drag the drives in to the virtual raid the tricky part is to be sure you have the correct drives in the correct order. this is trick as the drive name is all the same as this is default for genuine snap 4400 drives. but if you drill down you will get unique info on the drives such as port2, path0,target0,Lun0 that is my drive one in my current set up. and port2, path0, target1,Lun,0 would be my drive 2. target 2 is drive 3 and target 3 is drive 4.

once i was able to verify that then i was able to put the raid in the right order for the scan to do its best and correct scan.

and i am currently scanning now should be done some time tonight.

Xenoside

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

64K is what the SNAP systems use as defualt, but I do not know about the Guardian systems.

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

Thanks

Xenoside

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

latest update***

R-studio was able to emulate the virtual raid and I was able to recover files.
But due to the dmg I did to my file system it of course came at a cost.

Out of all of my data I estimate I was able to recover about 90 percent of the data. Out of that data about 60 percent of the data is without corruption of some type. Most of the files that were unreadable were complex file types such as some quark files and PNG's Nearly all of the jpegs were good and most of the Excel files were good. One of the down sides was that all of the files were with out names the system generated numerical names for them since the Naming convention was wiped with the MBR.

So flawless recovery no. Partial Recovery yes.

I will do a full write up on what i did and how i did it once i get done sorting out the junk.

basicaly I was told that the drives with corruption seem to be files that were spaned across multiple drives and that is why they are corrupt. and that ssems to hold true by judgeing the amount of corruption.

I will most likely be sending the drives off for recovery to see if they can do a better job.

Xenoside

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

A request if i may. Could you take a picture of the inside of that 4400? I'd like to compare it with my Dell 715n as i suspect that they may be the same hardware.

you could either post them here or email them to hallis@gmail.com

I would greatly appreciate it if you could and would do that for me.

Regards

Shane

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

If he emails them you shane, post them here for us :)

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

Shane, It should look closely like the 4500...

http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/att...1&d=1164829979
http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/att...1&d=1164829979

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

actually i will post them tomorrow the 4500 is very different then the 4400 the MOBO is very different.

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

I have to admit that I am pretty impressed at the amount of data that you were able to recover on your own, especially for no cost of your own, just time. Thanks for all the info!

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

Yes Time is the big issue I went through all my excel files today and weeded out the bad files, and then opened over 9k files and renamed them according to thier content that was just plain crappy. better thant the alternative of no data i guess.

I think the biggest problem i had was that my end users had so much crap really as they dont understand the meaning of archives. That and redundent files

oh well you cant win them all.

Xenoside.

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

also the 4500 is rather interesting as it has a PCI-X and a PCI the 4400 only has one PCI

Xenoside

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

Perhaps it is time I get my Win2003 server with a tape drive up and going...I am getting a little antsy after reading about all of the 4100 RAID 5 problems in this forum...

Re: 4400 Server down data recovery needed
 

Backups are still required with any data storage system.