RAID 5 Data Recovery With Deduplication

This organization is a leading company in engineering, drilling and construction of major projects in the energy and infrastructure sectors.

The Situation:

RAID 5 was configured on 9 hard drives with each hard drive capacity of 4 TB. Operating system was configured on 2 hard drive in RAID 1 with Windows 2012 R2 installed on it. Total number of volumes created by client was 6. Data Deduplication in Windows Server 2012 stores more data in less physical space and the same was enabled on volumes. 2 out of 9 hard drives failed at the same time, hence all the volumes were inaccessible. All the drives were collected and brought to our facilities in Chennai. Each hard drive was checked and found that the 2 hard drive was having mechanical failure.

The Solution:

We made sector by sector clone of each hard drive on our hard drive, the challenge was to make clone of 2 damaged disks. These damaged disks were opened in our clean room facilities to check its internal condition. Unfortulately, 1 hard drive was badly damaged and there were heavy scratches on the platter. Cloning of this damaged drive could not be completed. For, remaining one damaged drive we diagnosed that the head of hard drive was non-functional. We transplanted the head with donor hard drive from our inventory in clean room. The hard drive was further assembled and connected to our data recovery system for cloning purpose. With controlled settings we started to make clone of the hard drive and then successfully completed. Now, except one hard drive all the hard drives were cloned, our team of RAID technical experts started to check disk order, block order and block size. With the help of analyzed information, our tool and expertise we sucessfully rebuild the missing hard drive which clone could not be done. The data structure was perfectly fine but due to data deduplication it was internally corrupted as the information and content of the files were showing 0. With the help of our expetise and tools our technician enabled data deduplication on the existing data structure.

The Conclusion:

All the data from volume of 32.75 TB were successfully recovered and delivered after successful verification by the client. The work was appreciated & recognized by the enitre management of the company and delivery done within 14 days.