Promise TX4310 RAID-5 Recovery

[Massiefje]

Hello all,

This is going to be a long story, probably. But you're probably my last hope.

I had a Promise TX4310 Sata RAID5 card with 4x Seagate 7200 RPM 500GB disk. It worked like a charm for years, but I wanted to upgrade the server hardware (Motherboard, CPU, memory and such). I had a spare motherboard with CPU and extra memory, so I replaced boards and started the server, without the TX4310 card. Everything started up fine and I installed Server 2008 R2, including promise drivers.

I plugged in the card and drives and when I started my server, it told me it failed on drive 1. I checked it out and it appears I damaged port 1 on the card, by changing it to new motherboard. Too bad, but I couldn't repair it, so I order a new TX4310. Plugged it in, RAID array was found, Windows found my raid array and volume ad everything worked like a charm again!

After some days (maybe weeks) some file couldn't be opened. I investigated but couldn't quite find the problem. Drives were okay according to the Promise Diagnostics, so I just rebooted the complete system. Then the problems really start....

Raid array was gone, drive 1 again 'missing' or 'faulty' (can't remember) and windows couldn't initialize my volume anymore.

I tried initializing a couple of times, did not work. I turned my system off to save my data and did nothing for a few weeks (no time and money).

When I had time again, I rebooted the system, installed Windows 7 instead of Windows 2008 R2 and .... all of a sudden it told me: rebuilding array. I was happy. But.... my array was empty All my data was gone. And trust me, it was lots!

Now I have a working (I think) raid array and working volume, but no data. What is the proper way to recover?

I am now scanning with your ZAR recovery tool. Not raid recovery, but I have a single volume/drive available and not 4 seperate drives. So far, it has scanned 10% and only gave me like 1% data fragments. That should be a lot more.

I am starting to get worried

Please tell me the best way to attack this problem! Promise can not help me, their service is really bad. You buy their hardware, but once it fails, you are on your own, basically.

Ofcourse, if I have to buy your software, I will! It's very affordable and very much worth it, if it can recover my data!

I hope to hear from you!

[Massiefje]

Quick addition (couldn't find edit button):

Windows give me an empty drive, but I have NOT made another volume. My thinking: the less I do, the more chance of recovery I have. So I said I had a volume, that was incorrect. I have a drive, with no volume, and no driveletter assigned, obviously. Size: 1397,10 GB

[Massiefje]

Addition: free version seems to hang. Already had 1,5 hours of scantime, but hangs at 'block' 3 and uses no cpu anymore....

[Alexey V. Gubin]

I suppose you should

1. Build another machine, if at all possible, so as not to touch the promise controller.

2. Attach 3 drives of the array to it. In Windows Disk Management, do not initialize the drives, and do not format. And do not attach the drive "1" which you reference as involved in failures.

3. Do a RAID Recovery on these drives, see if you can get something.

4. Make sure you note which drive is in which port originally, so you can restore the exact original configuration if needed.

[Massiefje]

The thing is: all drives gave no SMART errors.... only raid-array errors.

Software is scanning now: 34 hours and at 3%, but did find some bad sectors though. Gonna keep it running as long as necessary.....

[Alexey V. Gubin]

mail me a zipped copy of the log file,

c:\Program Files\ZAR\Logfile.txt

to development@z-a-recovery.com

[Massiefje]

It's been a while since my last post, but..... I build another machine and made virtual disks from the working raid devices.

I'm now in the process of HOPING for a raid recovery.

It's scanning the 3 disks in raid-5 recovery mode and is not showing me 0 through 3, with 0% done and only filesystem stuff found so far.

I just started the recovery, so I'm not worried (yet) about the 0%, as long as I see something happening in the software, which I do! I see speeds ranging from 10 MBps to 140MBps... That's a good thing. I also see seeks/sec ranging from 0 to 60 seeks/sec.

I'm hoping I can use my 3 'good' drives (hopefully) to recover the failed 4th disk.

I'll keep you posted! So far, I'm happy!