RAID / NAS no longer detected
Summary
A RAID system or NAS drive that no longer detects can be caused by a myriad of potential issues. These problems can be related to the individual drives in the array or the system as a whole. RAID Data Recovery can be tricky, and if your data is crucial, we strongly suggest turning to the pros at IT Data Recovery so that no mistakes that can’t be taken back are made along the way toward recovery. If you’re not sure exactly what happened, it can be very dangerous to try to force drives back online, as sometimes a drive that is forced back online has been out of the array for years, and forcing it back into the array can then corrupt huge amounts of the current data. We always make clones of all of the drives in the array first, (assuming they’re healthy enough), before beginning any RAID Data Recovery so that we avoid any changes to the original drives during the recovery attempt. This is a VERY crucial step in the process of a safe RAID Recovery attempt.
As long as we get the drives or array in the shop before potential wrong steps are taken in amateur attempts, we’re usually successful at recovering data from bad RAID drives and bad NAS drives.
The Symptoms
The most common RAID and NAS problem for us to work on is that the RAID array is no longer detected. The most common reasons for this are multi-drive failure, RAID card failure, firmware update problems, and sometimes user error after the failure of the 1st or 2nd bad drive in the array.
Probably the most common situation for us to have with a failed RAID Array is that one drive has gone bad, potentially years ago, and the administrator / user was never alerted when the first bad drive failed. In this type of case, the server or RAID / NAS drive has sometimes been running in degraded mode, (often months or years) before the 2nd drive fails, after which the array shuts down completely and the data becomes inaccessible.
Often, however, we see cases come in where the server was repowered or reset, or there was a power failure and the array never came back online after that.
Sometimes, for no apparent reason, the RAID settings have been lost in the RAID card, and sometimes all drives seem to be detecting just fine but for some unknown reason the access to the data has been lost.
The Good News
IT Data Recovery has recovered hundreds of RAID arrays and NAS drives of all kinds over the years, and we are expert-level at them, to the extent that when necessary, we can examine the data at a hex level to determine uncommon RAID types and patterns for recovery. We are successful at RAID Data Recovery a majority of the time, especially when no major user mistakes have occurred after the failure.
The Solution
If the data on your failed RAID or NAS drive is important, getting your drives in to the pros at IT Data Recovery first, before mistakes are made, can be the difference between success or failure.
We mention this because of the few that we aren’t successful with, it’s usually because bad drives have been forced back online and improperly reintegrated into the system, which can cause problems and changes to the all of the original drives that even we can’t take back.
We make clones of all drives in the array before we even begin a RAID Data Recovery Evaluation, and we consider this a necessary step in the process, because that allows us to work only with copies of drives, so that we never have to make any changes that can’t be taken back on the original drives. Additionally, this cloning step also acts as a means of diagnosing which drives (if any) are bad or failing, and how bad they are.