[ale] (OT) NT data recovery

[Greg Freemyer]

On Tue, 2004-04-20 at 18:16, Preston Boyington wrote:
> i know some people that are looking for someone to do data recovery on one of their servers.  from speaking to them briefly, there are six drives in a RAID array and the unit is almost assuredly NT based.  basically the unit will boot but it won't see the other disks.  apparently the controller card has tested "good" so they believe it to be a hard disk issue.
> 
> can someone recommend a data recovery service for me to suggest?  i would like to throw something to ALE members if possible.
> 
> preston
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My company will do a free evaluation / cost estimate.  If they choose to
go forward, we gaurentee the recovery is consistent with our
evaluation.  If not the customer can choose not to accept any of the
recovered data, or they can get the partial recovery at a pro-rata cost.

Be aware that RAID system recoveries can get very expensive.

$1000-$3000 per drive is not unusual if the raid config in the
controller is lost.  (Unfortunately a common problem.)

We first look to see if the raid structure itself is valid.  (not always
easy to tell).  If so, the recovery is similar to an equivalent single
disk recovery.

If the raid unit is invalid, we effectively have to make dd copies of
each of the individual physical drives, then perform recovery on each of
those independently and try to piece the whole thing back together.  In
a large RAID 5, that can be very difficult.

FYI: I don't do any of this work myself, so I can't talk in any more
detail about the process.

Greg
-- 
Greg Freemyer