With over 20 years' experiences in recovering several hundreds of damaged RAID sets, LINWEI found that most of the users of RAID set are still unfamiliar with its usage. The promoting advertisement of RAID sets is too much stressing on its Fault Tolerance feature. And that will usually mislead users to think that damage condition won't easy to happen on RAID sets. The users won't care of the importance of data backing up due to the misunderstanding of its Fault Tolerance feature. Therefore, it will always result a big disaster while the damage occurs since the users will often neglect its potential risk.
Avoiding further damage and contamination of physical damage HDD, all recovery process will only be taken in Class 100 Clean Room.
The damaged HDD is still rewritable sometimes. In case for any accidental rewrite action, all equipment's adaptor will be set in “Write Protect” no matter for IDE BUS, SATA BUS or SCSI BUS.
All damaged HDD will be exchanged the new PCB layout testing control circuit in the initial inspection stage to unable the startup of the spindle motor. Then we will open the top cover of HDD and steady the read/write head to avoid further seeking and scratching the surface of media. Further more, we will use Oscilloscopes to measure each check pins and to realize the damage condition for recovery fee offering.
After the receipt of client's approval of recovery fee, the engineer starts to proceed effort costing“Read Block”by professional facilities under secure environment. The“Remove Commend”will be adopted to read continuously until the last block on the media is finished if we found media defect problem during the recovery process.
To make up the original RAID Configuration.
The senior engineer who is specializing in various operation systems such as Windows FAT32, NTFS, Novell, Linux ext3, FreeBSD, MAC OS, RAID….) will use our self-developed Hex Code tool to recover the data to FAT or NTFS files as per its original codes.
Theoretically, most of the data can be recovered if the surface of media has not been seriously scratched. For those normal HDD which is unable to read, such as RAID Configuration Fail, Off Line, there is still 98% successful ratio if the original files are still exist but have not been overwritten.
Herein, we provide some common damage situations of RAID for your reference:
RAID can not start (RAID Not Ready, Not Configuration, Off Line….).
Two HDDs occur damage in RAID 5.
RAID Rebuild Failure.
To make up the original RAID Configuration.
RAID HDD Ordering Failure.
Label the sequence numbers of each HDD (e.g. 1,2,3 or ID No.) at first for future distinguish need.
Do not delete RAID or RAID Configuration.
Do not initialize or re-create RAID even though only 1% while RAID Not Ready. The data will be deleted totally by this action. Only the professional engineers can take care of it in that case.
Please make sure the right sequence of HDD after remove of them. Save and Restart actions can be proceeded afterwards.
