When do you need this service?
- A RAID 5 or RAID 6 array that lost more drives than its redundancy allows
- A rebuild that failed part-way and left the array inconsistent
- A NAS that no longer mounts its volume, or reports the configuration as lost
- A controller failure, or an array whose drive order is no longer known
- A SAN with Fibre Channel drives that lost access to its volumes
- An HP EVA array (StorageWorks or P6000) that lost its virtual disks or no longer presents its volumes to the servers
Technical process
- Registration of the physical position of every drive before anything is touched, because an array only works with its members in the right order
- Technical evaluation of each drive and of the array as a whole. This stage has a cost.
- A technical report and a quotation covering the lab hours and specialists the case requires
- Individual repair of any drive that is not readable, in a clean room (laminar flow chamber with positive pressure) when the fault is mechanical
- Recovery of access to the data on each member drive and extraction of a binary copy
- Reconstruction of the array parameters and extraction of the file system
Frequently asked questions
Do you recover data from Unix servers such as Sun Solaris, IBM AIX or HP-UX?
Yes. We recover information from drives and arrays in Sun and Oracle servers running Solaris (UFS and ZFS), IBM servers running AIX (JFS and JFS2) and HP servers running HP-UX (VxFS and HFS), including drives with non-standard 520 or 528-byte sectors. We first recover access to the data on each drive and extract a binary copy; from it we get the files. When a case requires bringing the whole system back up, for example to open a database exactly as it was, we study the case: depending on the platform, we do it on the server itself, on compatible hardware provided by the customer or on an emulator.
Two drives failed in a RAID 5. Is the data gone?
Not necessarily. RAID 5 tolerates one failure, but in practice the two drives rarely fail at the same moment: the first often failed days or weeks earlier without anyone noticing. Recovering access to the drive that failed second is usually what makes the rebuild possible.
Should I try to rebuild the array myself first?
We would strongly advise against it. A rebuild started on a degraded array overwrites parity and can turn a recoverable case into an unrecoverable one.
Do you work with the drives, or do you need the whole server?
Usually the drives are enough, provided their positions are recorded. In some controller-specific cases we also need the controller in order to read its configuration.
What does the initial evaluation cost?
The technical evaluation has a cost, because it involves specialist diagnostic time. Its findings determine the report and the quotation, which covers the lab hours and personnel your case requires.
Which server and storage drives do you recover?
SAS, SATA and SCSI drives from servers and storage arrays, and enterprise NVMe SSDs in U.2 and U.3, PCIe add-in card (AIC) and EDSFF (E1.S and E3.S) form factors. If the drive belongs to an array, it is cloned and brought into the rebuild.
Do you recover encrypted volumes or files that have been damaged?
Yes. When an encrypted volume or file (BitLocker, VeraCrypt, LUKS or virtual machine encryption) becomes corrupted, we repair the damage so that it opens again with its key. We do this in the laboratory and, when the case allows, also on site at your premises. For this we need your password or recovery key: without it, the encryption cannot be opened.
Do you recover HP EVA arrays (StorageWorks and P6000)?
Yes, we evaluate each case. An EVA is not an ordinary RAID: it spreads the information across virtual disks distributed over all the drives in the group, using a format of HP's own, and conventional RAID tools cannot read it. That is why it is important to hand over every drive in the array, with its position marked, and not to reinitialize or reconfigure the system. For each drive, whether Fibre Channel or SAS, we recover access to its data and extract a binary copy.
Is your array offline and your operation stopped?
Write to us and we will get back to you straight away, 24/7/365.
We answer in English by email and WhatsApp. Phone calls are answered in Spanish.
Related services
Is this for you or for your organisation? For businesses and institutions we work with a signed confidentiality agreement, formal invoicing and priority 24/7 support.