[SOLVED] Raid 5 Disk mix up

[Fuchur86]

Hey everybody,

I have an ICY Box RD3640SU3 that's running as a RAID 5 with 4x4TB disks with archived video footage. Once I exhausted all that space I got 4 new 4TB drives, took the old ones out of the Raid enclosure and made a sceond RAID 5 setup.

I recently swapped those drives back to access some of the old footage but forgot to swap the first disk and powerd the enclosure on. I first didn't even realize what happend, but the RAID wasn't recognized by windows. It was only then, that I realized the mix up.

So 2 Raid 5 Setups à 4 disks, accidentally had disk No1 of setup 2 installed together with disks No 2-4 of setup 1 and turned the enclosure on.

Even after putting the correct hard drive in again windows won't recognize the setup.

Did I fry disks 2-4 of setup one as well as disk 1 of setup 2? Or do you see any chance of me getting my data back?

(I guess raid setup 2 should be fine, since I should be able to install disks 2-4 of setup 2 together with an empty drive and just have it rebuild, right?)

Thanks in advance for your help!
Johannes

 

[S Haran]

If this is high value data it is always best to seek pro help as you could possibly make things worse. And it is often suggested that you take clone images of the drives and do your recovery work on the clones.

For DIY there is RAID recovery software you can try. Two popular choices are r-studio.com or dmde.com

You should be able to assemble the RAID5 in degraded mode using 3 drives. And if successful recover your data.

It is also possible your actions destroyed your data. The thing with failed RAID recovery is you are never sure if the problem is with your recovery method or if the data is truly unrecoverable.

Hopefully you won't need to go down this road but having faced this problem with other cases I wrote a tool that takes as input a copy of a sample file known to exist on the failed RAID and does a hex search on the raw RAID member drives for the sample file contents. Thus confirming if the sample file is present. And if so the rest of your data should be present as well. You could do something similar with a hex editor.

Let us know how things go.