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Data recovery. Worth it? Resources?

Oyeve

Oyeve

Lifer
So, my companies 2003 exchange servers raid totally died. New server is being built with exchange 2010 and I have everyones OST converted to PST so emails have been recovered. All except my boss who's father recently passed away and he has some emails he would like to have that for whatever reason were not in his OST. So, I have 3 HDs from the old server that was in a raid 5 config. The HD drive zero AND the hot spare both crapped out so their went the system. Anyhow, I would like to know if it is even possible to recover data (actually, Im pretty sure it is) but I havent used a professional recovery service in years. Anyone know of a reputable resource? totaly data is roughly 70GB.
 
Honestly only your company can decide that. The cost depends on what really broke. I could easily see it costing in excess of $2000 / drive.
 
A few grand is worth it. I just need a company to come thru. The email was a VM so if the VM file could be restored thats all I really need.
 
The biggest problem you're going to have is that the email server was in a VM, which means that it's not individual files, but rather one monolithic file. That means that it's extremely unlikely you'll get it back if there's any physical damage to the drive platters or any corruption in the actual data. Basically, you need the entire contents of the drive array to be viable in order to access the contents of the VM. A lot of times, just the control board on the drive fails and the drive can be restored by replacing that with another board of the same model and revision. If that's the case, recovery should be relatively straight forward.

www.gillware.com is one that we use. Their prices are very reasonable, and they'll usually perform an initial inspection for free. I don't know what their prices are for VMWare file systems or RAID 5, though.
 
lots of lingos here, by VM do you mean a email of Voice mail or the email was on a vmware server..

either way its a lot of work. the email was exchange jet format, you basically need to restore those edb, check for errors, and either build another 2003 exchange server with same info and mount the edb files

i remember 2003 restore is a bit tough, you can actually get ebd parsers so you wont need to build a whole server just to read the file

http://www.appassure.com/server-bac...overy/recover-emails/exchange-email-recovery/
i would use that if you can get your edb back
 
Oyeve said:
So, my companies 2003 exchange servers raid totally died. New server is being built with exchange 2010 and I have everyones OST converted to PST so emails have been recovered. All except my boss who's father recently passed away and he has some emails he would like to have that for whatever reason were not in his OST. So, I have 3 HDs from the old server that was in a raid 5 config. The HD drive zero AND the hot spare both crapped out so their went the system. Anyhow, I would like to know if it is even possible to recover data (actually, Im pretty sure it is) but I havent used a professional recovery service in years. Anyone know of a reputable resource? totaly data is roughly 70GB.
Click to expand...

Are you sure that the controller isn't just dead? Are you sure the drives are dead? Also, one drive and a hot spare dying shouldn't trash a RAID5 array.
 
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drebo said:
It's only 3 drives in a RAID 5. No hotspare. 2 dead drives = dead array.
Click to expand...
True dat. I took the 3 drives out and ran easeUS on them. Drive 0 is wiped, drive 1 has the correct partitions and drive 2 has the correct partitions. When the system took a dump drive 2 was yellow (indicating a bad drive) and drive 0 was blinking yellow-green intermittently. The fact that EaseUS sees the partitions and data on drive 1 and 2 (2 was the hot spare) makes me feel hopeful the data can be recovered. I was considering putting drives 1 and 2 back into the server to see if it boots.
 
Oyeve said:
True dat. I took the 3 drives out and ran easeUS on them. Drive 0 is wiped, drive 1 has the correct partitions and drive 2 has the correct partitions. When the system took a dump drive 2 was yellow (indicating a bad drive) and drive 0 was blinking yellow-green intermittently. The fact that EaseUS sees the partitions and data on drive 1 and 2 (2 was the hot spare) makes me feel hopeful the data can be recovered. I was considering putting drives 1 and 2 back into the server to see if it boots.
Click to expand...

RAID 5 wouldn't show "partitions." You might be able to slam them back in to the controller and get them to come up in a degraded state. If you do, get them online and start copying the VM's off.
 
imagoon said:
RAID 5 wouldn't show "partitions." You might be able to slam them back in to the controller and get them to come up in a degraded state. If you do, get them online and start copying the VM's off.
Click to expand...
It appears drive 0 was set for raid 1 and drives 1 and 2 raid 5. Running EaseUS show much data on drives 1 and 2 and nothing on drive 0. I didnt mean partitions in the logical sense, I meant partitions as to where I had the exchange database set. When all was working I created a drive Z: for the information store. Drive c: was win2ksvr. Oh well, new 2010 server will be installed tomorrow. Hopefully my new exchange server will be up by monday and then i can worry about retrieving the dead systems VMs.
 
This is pretty confusing but one thing is certain, data recovery on harddisks that were in a hardware based raid are extremely difficult to recover any data from. Almost impossible in fact, unless you use the same model raid card that created the array afaik (since each raid controller often has its own method of writing data to a disk).
Ensure any thing you do these drives is read only. changing even a few bits will likely fuck the entire array.
If you had 3 disks in the raid 5 array, and only 1 was damaged, you'd be ok restoring the data with the same model array controller. If you only had 2 disks in the raid 5 array, and one was damaged, you're screwed.

As mentioned in the previous thread, you're best bet (based on your scenario) is going to a hosted solution, you could be up and running in 1-3 days. Trying to get a new Exchange server online is going to take several days of configuration and testing just to get something working, which likely wont be exactly what you want and you'll have to start over. Exchange 2010 is a very complex server (to get configured properly), even for those with some exchange experience.
At the least you could go to hosted exchange for a few months while you play with, learn, and configure your exchange server in the background. With Microsoft Office 365, you can actually run both their cloud hosting, and an on-site exchange server, having some accounts locally, and some in the cloud.

You can also use a service like mailroute, which, in a case like this, would actually hold your email until you have a server back online, at which point it would release all your messages to the server.

If just the harddrives are having difficulty, you might be able to restore their functionality with spinrite. The program works on individual drive sectors and doesnt give a shit about the type of the actual data (ie file systems, formats, raids).
 
Oyeve, just to be clear, you have THREE total drives, and TWO of them have failed. (in RAID 5, the array itself does not have such a thing as a "spare" drive because the parity is rolling, but many hardware controllers let you build an array PLUS have a spare drive assigned so that if the controller kicks out a drive it will auto-rebuild onto the spare)

In this case, you will need professional data recovery, because they're going to need to find a way to resurrect one of those two failed drives, otherwise no data is getting recovered. With RAID 5 and only one drive, it's technically possible to pick out chunks of data by hand, but that's extremely labor intensive and you get what you get.

dawks,

>since each raid controller often has its own method of writing data to a disk).

Not with a modern, quality controller. SNIA DDF FTW.

>If just the harddrives are having difficulty, you might be able to restore their functionality with spinrite.

spinrite bad. spinrite *baaaaad*.
 
drebo said:
It's only 3 drives in a RAID 5. No hotspare. 2 dead drives = dead array.
Click to expand...

I understand that, but he specifically said one drive and the hotspare was dead, implying he had four drives, three of which were participating in the array (just checked again and he said 3 drives in RAID5 and called a drive a hot spare, which implies a fourth drive). One dead drive and the hot spare failing to come online does NOT bring the array down as he would still have two good drives of a three drive set.

cmetz said:
Oyeve, just to be clear, you have THREE total drives, and TWO of them have failed. (in RAID 5, the array itself does not have such a thing as a "spare" drive because the parity is rolling, but many hardware controllers let you build an array PLUS have a spare drive assigned so that if the controller kicks out a drive it will auto-rebuild onto the spare)
Click to expand...

This guy sees the same thing I saw in Oyeve's message. I think Oyeve was just using improper terminology. The array had three total drives and yes, 2 of them going down would destroy the array.
 
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