On a Scale of 1-10, How Screwed am I?

[Kered124]

Hello,

 

SO. Time to own up to a mistake. I had a server running some personal projects in a couple of virtual machines. Over the weekend something happened and now 2 of my drives aren't being initialized by the RAID controller. The disks still spin and show up in the controller, but aren't recognized as any part of the array. It was a RAID 5 on a PERC5/i controller. Is there any possibility of data recovery without sending the drives out, or am I SOL? This is the part where I get to eat my own words, because I constantly preach about how RAID isn't a backup even though I hadn't been following those rules on this system.

 

tldr; My data is most likely gone- redundancy does not equal backup- back up your data.

 

Thanks in advance for any insight

[leadeater]

Do you have a pure HBA? If so write down the stripe size of the array then use Recover My Files to do a RAID data recovery, just input the original settings of the array and it'll try to read the data from the disks. But if the disks are screwed then you have no chance with this method.

 

The more you try and fix it or recover the data the more you'll damage it btw, but you're not planning on actually send the disks away for data recovery?

[Kered124]

Just now, leadeater said:

Do you have a pure HBA?

These disks were part of a 3-disk hardware RAID5. I won't send the disks in as it isn't worth the cost to me. The data wasn't mission critical or anything- just still a setback to lose it.

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, Kered124 said:

These disks were part of a 3-disk hardware RAID5.

You'll need an HBA to attempt a data recovery though, won't be able to use the RAID card for it.

[Kered124]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

You'll need an HBA to attempt a data recovery though, won't be able to use the RAID card for it.

 

Ohhh, yes I do have an HBA available to use (can I just use a desktop motherboard with enough sata ports? Sorry, I misunderstood and thought you were asking if the array was originally being controlled via software raid + an HBA.

[leadeater]

2 minutes ago, Kered124 said:

Ohhh, yes I do have an HBA available to use (can I just use a desktop motherboard with enough sata ports? Sorry, I misunderstood and thought you were asking if the array was originally being controlled via software raid + an HBA.

Only if the disks are SATA and not SAS?

[Kered124]

 

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Only if the disks are SATA and not SAS?

The disks are all sata- for that array at least. I had one SAS drive in the server set up as a plain scratch disk- but it wasn't a part of my RAID.