Irecover "disappears"

[RudyV]

Hi, I am running IRecover on a failed RAID 5 array. The array consists of 4 Western Digital 250Gb hard drives. It appears one of the drives is possibly bad (it failed a confidence test).

So I start IRecover and go through all the steps up to the point where the software starts analyzing the drives. The analyzation process takes really long (about 18 hours) then it gets to about 40% complete and the software just "disappears". There are no errors or anything. I've tried running the software twice. Please help....

[RudyV]

Follow Up on my situation:  The machine I am running iRecover on is a 64Bit Windows 7  Ultimate PC with 4GB RAM. The computer has 2 partitions (1 physical drive) "C" (which has 22GB of free space left, I have the OS installed here) and "D" which has 860 GB of free space.

The Raid 5 array came from a Dell PowerEdge Server.

Thanks!

[RudyV]

Just realized you guys are in "european time".  I've attached the log file...

[Tom]

This is quite rare. If I recall correctly it can have something to do with memory issues, but these disks are not that large. What do you know about the contents of the array? File system type, the amount of files (loads of small files or larger files) ? And, nothing in the Windows error logs?

Did you take the suspect drive out? It might be beneficial to only use the 3 good disks, see what happens.

[Joep]

It's faling during RAID analysis, because it can not find a 'solution': a set of RAID parameters it can work with. It will try and try until it runs out of memory.

Basically means, probably, that the array is too damaged. What happened to it and what was tried to 'recover' the array already?

[RudyV]

So far I have taken the suspect drive out of the RAID 5 array, so now I am left with 3 drives. Other than this nothing has been tried to recover the data.
**UPDATE** The data has been recovered using only the 3 hard drives.  Oddly enough "old data" is there (excel files and pdf's from2008-2011). But the majority of my "newer files" (2011 to present) are not there. It seems the recovered data is jumbled (i.e. the word doc's I had created are not in the folders I left them in, they now live in folders called Lost Files). So my questions is: Is there anything I can do differently to recover the newer data? I know the name of the folders/files that I need.

[Tom]

If the "old" files are intact the recovery went ok. The new files are not in their original location but are they ok? Simply recover as much as possible and sort out the results later.