Another Areca Raid Array Recovery...

[Mbarton]

I am definitely not the first to post about an Areca recovery situation here, In fact, when googling the topic this is one of the first results: https://hardforum.com/threads/how-to-recover-an-areca-raidset.1741024/ However haven't found anything yet for my situation.

I have a client that I have recently been taking over all of there IT. Shortly before I got there/Part of the reasons I was called in, Was they had multiple Areca raid sets failing out of 7 I was able to get 6 working well enough to Back them up properly. (Raid is not a backup!) Yes, its that bad they were only doing partial backups of Important data! While editing off of these raids regularly and swapping the raid cards and PCs often. Its a miracle this has only just happened...

Setup Information:
The Original Raid card was either an ARC 1883X VER.C Dual-port or a single port variant.
The Raid enclosure is a G | Speed eSPRO GSPPNB16666-1BD8
Contains 4/4 4TB HDD in Raid 5 default settings
This data is crucial and before attempting anything risky I will need to mirror the drives if I haven't already done so.
All 4x Drives are currently showing as Free

What Client has done:
Original issue #3 HDD failed, The Client replaced and attempted to rebuild. Weather client fault or raid issue. The drive was never rebuilt or even touched by the raid.

The client attempted to reboot and the raid was suddenly missing, They tied swapping drives around, returning the failed drive, reboots, etc No luck

What I have done:
Scanned all the drives for issues including the failed #3 drive, None of them are reporting S.M.A.R.T Issues. However, the new drive was never formatted from the factory. I replaced it with the original #3 drive and selected Use failed disk or simmer in the web UI

Tried all 3x Possible Original cards and Orginal PC the raid was made on.

Ran RESCUE

Ran LeVeL2ReScUe

No Luck, I have had success with RESCUE before and I want to say I remember when booting it saying attempting RESCUE. However, with this raid,it always says No BIOS Found weather I run RESCUE or not Tried both in BIOS and in WebUI. At some point during testing, all drives started showing up as free, I believe they may have been re-initialized.

Any help would be great! @odditory Seems like you may know a thing or to I started with your post from 2013 and made an account on here from that lol

 

[Mbarton]

Interesting, Looks like Drive #3 is being recognized as a RAID member, Only thing I have done is reboots since the above post. Hmmmm

After a reboot and trying RESCUE, #3 is back to "FREE"

 

[Mbarton]

I may be onto something, attempting to recover some of the files now.

 

[mwroobel]

Well, my first suggestion (especially since there is no complete back up) is to make bit-perfect backups of all involved drives, and then to ONLY work on the copies. This will allow you to undue any additional damage you may possibly do. Next, do you know which card they were actually using for this particular array, and if so please post the complete log for the controller. Also let us know what BIOS and firmware versions the card is at, and what OS the box is running on.

 

[bfeist]

I may be onto something, attempting to recover some of the files now.

Could you add anything about how this went? Currently working on a situation where a whole row of drives in a 12 bay Areca enclosure have just disappeared.