HELP DL380 G5 RAID array lost due to two failed hard drives

[Chomot1]

Where I work has an old G5 working as a share drive for the employees and if failed two drives.  It has the P400 controller and when I run the HP Smart Start CD and array diagnostics I get...  Bad news

"This logical drive has failed and cannot be used.  All data on this logical drive has been lost."

I got some new drives before I started looking into this thinking that by replacing the bad ones it was possible to rebuild with the HP software but when I went to do that I received the error.

My obvious quesiton is how to fix this and get my data at least and at best the server working back to the way it was?

Thank you for your responce

[Jimmy Vance]

What RAID level was the array? If it was anything less that RAID 6 the data is probably not recoverable

[Data-Medics]

I wouldn't say that it's "unrecoverable" as I've probably recovered a hundred RAID 5 arrays with two failed disks.  Un-rebuildable via the RAID controller, yes.

What will need to be done is:

1. At least one of the failed drives (preferably the last one to fail) will need to be recovered and imaged onto a good drive.
2. All other drives should be cloned as well for safekeeping.
3. Data analyzed to determine what all the original settings were (possibly you can get some of this from the RAID BIOS).
4. Using the copies of all the drives a virtual array will need to be built and data extracted from that.  There's a fair amount of data recovery software that can do this such as R-Studio, R-Explorer, Reclaime Pro, etc. but it's not something that's easy to DIY if you don't have extensive knowledge of RAID algorithms and file system structures.

We do this all the time working in professional data recovery.  The cost at most reasonable labs is around $300-500/drive times the total number of drives in the array, plus a few possible extras depending on how badly the drives have failed and what type of drives they are.

If you tell us where you're at in the world, I can probably recommend a lab in your region that wouldn't rip you off.  Just be wary of some ot the bigger well known companies as they're known to really price gouge RAID arrays.  They assume it's important data and you're willing to pay a lot to get back.  So they'll often quote rates into the $10-20K range just because they know they can.

[Chomot1]

That is what I eneded up doing, the manager told me to take it to a professional and so i did.  They have them now but they told me of the two bad HDs one had bad sectors and the other had mechanical scratches.  The bad sector one they will be able to clone and then they can extract all the data of to an external USB hard drive.

I was/am hoping that once I get them all back I can restall and with only one bad drive let the RAID 5 rebuild iteslf once I replace the HD with the scratches.

if not I will have to reloade the OS from scratch and copy the data back over.

When replaceing one HD in a RAID five is that an automatic process in Windows or what?

[Chomot1]

I am located in Dubai and the place I took it to was Data Angle, they quoted 1200 usd so I guess that is not too much based on your info.  That is good to know

http://www.angeldatarecovery.com/contact-us/

[Chomot1]

I am back up and running now.  The data recovery service found that of the eight 146 GB drives the #3 and #7 were bad.  The #3 had bad sectors and the #7 had scratched disks.  They cloned the #3 and when I put back in seven of the eight drives with the clone I managed to boot to Windows 2008 R2 after a system recovery step.  Everything was there and then I installed a replacment #7 drive.  All is well.

The quesiton I have now is, does HP or any software vender have some hard drive monitoring software I can install on this that will give me an alert if problems start occureing?  If so what is that called?  Or do I just need to learn how to configure what is already in 2008 R2?

Thanks