Areca 1220 Array repair

[bzaayer]

I had a raid 6 array fail using an ARC-1220. My client tried to fix the problems and made it worse. The Raid 6 array used 7 drives. Drives 1,3,4,5,6,7,8. Drive 8 failed. Then the raid controller decided to remove 2 of the working drives in the array and created two other 1 drive raid 6 arrays. So I had 4 drives belonging to the original raid 6 array, one failed drive and the 2 drives that orginally belonged the array but for some reason decided they belonged to different newly created arrays. My client then deleted all 3 arrays. I am not sure what to do now to get back their information. Any help would be appreciated. The drives have not been overwritten as far as I can tell.

Unfortuantly I cannot restore from backup as they are using a piece of software that cannot be reinstalled and not image is available.

 

[staticlag]

1. Buy 7 identically sized disks and make 1:1 copies of all the data. Then maybe a few more disks to house any recovered data.
2. I would go straight to R-studio and copy the important data off. As long as it's there you should be able to reconstruct the RAID in software.

You may need a non RAID HBA to work with Rstudio, if you have enough motherboard SATA/SAS ports to plug into it should work.

Otherwise I would go straight to drivesavers.

 

[mwroobel]

As mentioned above, before you do ANYTHING, do you have eight spare 500GB drives (or a 4TB to store image files of the drives at least) to make an image set of the drives you currently have installed? If the data you have is truly valuable to you, before you make any attempt to repair the damage you should make a complete image of each of the drives you currently have. This will allow you to attempt any avenues you choose and still have the ability to go back to where you are right now if you need to attempt another strategy.
I will forgo my normal RAID is not a backup speech, but wonder what kind of app is installed that can't be backed up or reinstalled?

Do you have the complete layouts of your raidsets and volumesets from when you created them? Please post a complete log from your Areca card from before the current situation to today.

What EXACTLY did your client do before you became involved, other than deleting the incorrect arrays?