Unable to open ZAR file (RAID 5 recovery)

[unbongwah]

Hello,

I am using iRecover Professional v6 to recover data from a failed RAID 5 configuration: initially five 2TB Hitachi drives, one of the drives went bad and was RMAed, so four drives left to be scanned.  The initial scan by iRecover was very slow - similar to what this user encountered - and took weeks(!) for it to finish.  Thankfully, neither my PC nor iRecover died during that time and the scan was completed successfully.  Needless to say, the very first thing I did after it finished the scan was save the ZAR file - in two different locations, no less, just to be sure.

I then began recovering my data; thankfully, iRecover was successful in retrieving most of my files so far, which was a big relief.     Unfortunately, my PC locked up before I'd finished retrieving all my data - no idea if it was iRecover or something else which caused the crash.  After I rebooted and went back to iRecover, however, I found I couldn't load my ZAR file; instead I get this error message:

UNABLE TO CONTINUE:
Failed to match a parity member while loading
Unable to continue processing, program will now terminate.
Not a bug - data is probably beyond repair, or something is
misconfigured.

I tried opening both copies of the ZAR file I'd made, without success.  Obviously, considering how long it took the first time, I don't want to have to re-run the RAID scan - frankly, I'm not sure my PC would go without crashing for that long again.

Any suggestions for what I can do to get the ZAR file to open?  Thanks a lot!

[Joep]

Hello,

Did anything change in the disk configuration after the long scan? Because for example adding a disk may confuse iRecover: Windows may change disk order and this will cause iRecover to match actual disks with the disks in the ZAR file.

[unbongwah]

Did anything change in the disk configuration after the long scan?

Not to the RAID drives, but I did mount & format a separate drive to use for the data recovery during the weeks-long scan.  I shut down, disconnected the new drive, and restarted Windows; but I still get the same error message when I try to load the ZAR file.  So if I did confuse Windows / iRecover by adding that drive, I don't know how to "un-confuse" them now. 

[Tom]

There are only two options:
1. make things exactly as they were when you saved the zar file,
2. re-scan the drives.

[Joep]

Maybe email us the logfile (zipped to support@diydatarecovery.nl).