RAID 5 Recovery Corrupted files

[philman]

I have purchased & used iRecover professional to recover a 3 disk RAID 5 array, all seemed to work as it should and I was able to recover a lot of data. However almost all the data is corrupt, ie Jpegs won't open or mp3's won't play or are jumbled. I'm not sure what has gone wrong or if there is any chance of recovering these files. Any help would be most appreciated.

[Joep]

Hello,

What happened to the array?

[philman]

I had a single drive failure on a server, which I replaced in the usual manner hoping the RAID would rebuild, but for whatever reason it didn't, this was purely a Data only RAID so not bootable & no operating system files. I then used the RAID controllers control panel to create a new raid, which was probably where i went wrong! so I ended up with a new RAID array but with no data! I also decided to repair the faulty hard drive by replacing the controller board on the drive which worked fine, so now I have all 3 original RAID disks working but in a new array with no data. Then I changed the cmos settings on the motherboard (ASUS KFN5-D SLi, onboard nvidia RAID controller) so that it would treat the RAID as single SATA drives so I could use iRecover to try to get the data back. I have also tried other read-only recovery software with pretty much the same result, loads of DATA found but all corrupt to varying degrees. I am still hoping there is some way to configure iRecover to retrieve this data without the corruption, your help is much appreciated, please let me know if you need any more information.

[Tom]

Sounds like this is not going to work out well. Creating a new RAID was just about the worst you could have done, with the exception of setting fire to the disks. If (IF) iRecover is going to find anything you will need to make sure that the disks are accessible to iRecover as 3 single disks. If the auto-analysis doesn't work well (which it didn't, for obvious reasons) you may get some results if you know the original details of the RAID (the order of the disks and the stripe size and the parity details) and then enter that info manually when selecting "define RAID manually" from the RAID recovery screen. Other than that I don't have any further suggestions, but maybe Joep has later on.

[philman]

Thanks Tom, I have tried recovering as single disks but this produced the corrupt files. I am running irecover at the moment using the 3 disks in a RAID array and so far it looks more promising as there appears to be more Data fragments being found in nice neat lines together, whether this has any relevance to the quality of data that i end up with i have no idea, but will let you know for sure. Appreciate your help on this.