Data Recovery Specialists

[fstarbkk]

I wonder if anyone can recomment a really good data recovery company in Thailand. I have a RAID 5 array critical data with 2 disks ostensiblt dead. So cost is secondary. Not a good day at the office...

Thanks for any good leads!

[robblok]

You did not set up any other data safety things like backups ? Wow I got a raid 5 array too but it gets backed up to a USB disk and to the internet.

I hope you can find what you look for I have some seen some threads here about it so you might be lucky. But because its a raid array it will also be harder as just a normal disk

[dharmabm]

How many disks in the array? It is unusual for 2 disks to go at the same time. Have you tried any recovery yet? I MIGHT be able to help, you can PM me if you like.

Sent from my LG-P970 using Thaivisa Connect App

[rakman]

What kind of raid 5 drives are these? Hot swap SCSI, FC, SATA or SAS?

Some of these technologies can have 1 drive assume the address of another in the back plane creating a "dual" drive failure when only one did, or temporarily did.

Assuming you know which 2 went "bad" you can first clone the working ones, one at a time on a compatible interface, hopefully all of them. Yes, you'll need a bunch of spare drives, and next try the back plane for "drive address mimicking". If the array back plane checks out, try using the clones to rebuild the array. It's possible one of the drive electronics went bad.

If two drives are really bad, then it gets more tricky.

[keeniau96]

Gregory at Phuket DataWizards is excellent, has his own clean chamber if need to disassemble the HDD. Give him a call. Russian with fluent English.

[p_brownstone]

Top floor of Panthip Plaza - where the big IT Store is; turn left before you enter that Store and follow the corridor.

On the left there is a large shop with a yellow sign - can't recall the name - one chap speaks good English.

Patrick

[fstarbkk]

Thanks guys. I got some really promising leads from this already and will follow up on them. Still welcome more, especially if there's someone really good in Phuket area. Really appreciate the help!

[Somtamnication]

It is a Mac raid, Promise Pegasus r4 thunderbolt, Raid 5, 4 drives (I think Hitachi) 1.5 tb each. Any Mac people out there with experience, please pm the OP.

[Dork]

You have my sympathies. Failed RAID can be a bit scary. Agree with others that it is unlikely that 2 disks have gone at the same time. I've often seen erroneous info about the individual disks once the array has gone bad.

I have had good success with a couple of utilities. Firstly, if you can still access the array but not the data you may just need to recover the partition tables. This free utility does an excellent job and will very quickly show you what is recoverable.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

If you have lost the array itself then things get a bit more complicated. Having tried several expensive RAID recovery solutions the one that has worked the best for me is Reclaime RAID recovery. It is a 2 step process. Firstly you use the free RAID recovery utility to rebuild the array then to recover the actual data you use another utility which is not free (costs about USD80 I think).

http://www.freeraidrecovery.com

Best of luck!

[fstarbkk]

You have my sympathies. Failed RAID can be a bit scary. Agree with others that it is unlikely that 2 disks have gone at the same time. I've often seen erroneous info about the individual disks once the array has gone bad.

I have had good success with a couple of utilities. Firstly, if you can still access the array but not the data you may just need to recover the partition tables. This free utility does an excellent job and will very quickly show you what is recoverable.

http://www.cgsecurit...g/wiki/TestDisk

If you have lost the array itself then things get a bit more complicated. Having tried several expensive RAID recovery solutions the one that has worked the best for me is Reclaime RAID recovery. It is a 2 step process. Firstly you use the free RAID recovery utility to rebuild the array then to recover the actual data you use another utility which is not free (costs about USD80 I think).

http://www.freeraidrecovery.com

Best of luck!

Thanks so much! We'll look into that

[fstarbkk]

Thank you all again for the great leads and the excellent advice. I think we're on the way to recovery.

Let's hope the light at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train.

[fstarbkk]

Gregory at Phuket DataWizards is excellent, has his own clean chamber if need to disassemble the HDD. Give him a call. Russian with fluent English.

You were absolutely right! Thanks for putting me on his trail.

[Dork]

You obviously found a solution. That's great!

Just out of curiosity, what caused the array failure?

[fstarbkk]

You obviously found a solution. That's great!

Just out of curiosity, what caused the array failure?

I'm not completely sure. But the logs seemed to indicate a heat problem on the backplane around the time of the failure. at this time the whole thing seems to work again. But of course we have lost confidence in this solution and will try to get a new box. In any event we will no longer use it in a mission-critical role.

[ITGabs]

You obviously found a solution. That's great!

Just out of curiosity, what caused the array failure?

I'm not completely sure. But the logs seemed to indicate a heat problem on the backplane around the time of the failure. at this time the whole thing seems to work again. But of course we have lost confidence in this solution and will try to get a new box. In any event we will no longer use it in a mission-critical role.

What Raid controller you use? in the case of 3ware you can use the 3DM monitor that is pretty good, many years ago we had a similar problem with a RAID 0 in a testing server, nobody notice that one of the RAID disk was completely dead, when the server crash we had big complains with the datacenter since the server had only few months and one disk was completely died and the another have random sector error.

Later we included in the sys admin tasks check periodical the status or the RAID, the 3DM monitor have many reporting and maintenance options.

Good luck that everything is ok now

[Gregory Morozov]

Definitely something with the NAS itself because the drives were fine physically

[Somtamnication]

That was my suggestion to him. The motherboard or daughterboard (if it had one) on the R4 might be bad.

[Dork]

What kind of HDD's are they? What about this TLER issue with some drives in a RAID 5?

Actually the technical aspects of this are over my head but I have also had a NAS RAID 5 crap out for no apparent reason except that I was writing heavily to that array at the time. The enclosure was on a UPS as is everything else which didn't suffer any issues. Afterwards I did extensive tests on all the HDD's - all ok. Eventually recovered the data, put it all back together & it's run fine now for months.

Lot's of stuff I read says that RAID should only utilize enterprise class HDD's blah, blah which seems a little unrealistic to me nowadays since the majority of NAS boxes are used in home media environments where enterprise class HDD's are too expensive.

Any opinions about this?

[Gregory Morozov]

Short answer - for home RAIDs with movies, pictures etc. drives without TLER are fine BUT depending on RAID controller logic, can lead to "kick-outs". For the rest, and especially for multi-user environments, use drives designed for RAID. They are not THAT expensive, especially compared to the cost of data and cost of time in your organization! On the heavy loaded servers, no time-limited recovery feature on RAID drives can lead to some dramatic consequences...

[Dork]

Short answer - for home RAIDs with movies, pictures etc. drives without TLER are fine BUT depending on RAID controller logic, can lead to "kick-outs". For the rest, and especially for multi-user environments, use drives designed for RAID. They are not THAT expensive, especially compared to the cost of data and cost of time in your organization! On the heavy loaded servers, no time-limited recovery feature on RAID drives can lead to some dramatic consequences...

Thanks for the explanation. Is there an easy way to tell which drives have TLER? Because the manufacturers specs don't make that obvious.

Cheers.

[Gregory Morozov]

Can be checked and sometimes set by smartctl utility from smartmontools package.

Remember it's called TLER on WD, CCTL on Samsung and Hitachi and ERC on Seagate when looking at specs.

[Dork]

Can be checked and sometimes set by smartctl utility from smartmontools package.

Remember it's called TLER on WD, CCTL on Samsung and Hitachi and ERC on Seagate when looking at specs.

Thanks again.

[Trevor25222]

Top floor of Panthip Plaza - where the big IT Store is; turn left before you enter that Store and follow the corridor.

On the left there is a large shop with a yellow sign - can't recall the name - one chap speaks good English.

Patrick

I have a 5-year-old Maxtor (Seagate) 1TB hard drive which will not mount. Tried fitting it into a new caddy but the problem remains. It's about 60% full of data I wish to recover to a new external hard drive which I will supply.

1) Is this outfit in Pantip plaza as cheap as I'm likely to find in Bangkok?

2) Can they do it while I wait?

3) Will they respect the privacy of my files?

4) Any idea on cost per GB?

5) Any other data recovery services -- possibly westerners freelancing -- in Bangkok?

6) Am I likely to find this portable, Firewire hard drive any cheaper than ฿5,755 in Thailand?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Passport-Portable-Firewire/dp/B005MHN53K/ref=sr_1_19?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1350323011&sr=1-19

Thanks for any advice and leads.