In this article, we will take you through a DIY systematic RAID recovery approach that you can apply to safely rebuild and recover data from a broken RAID 0, RAID 5, or RAID 6 set.

• Recover Drive From Mac Software Raid Windows 7

A damaged or broken RAID can be a result of human errors, hardware or software failure, malware infection, mechanical errors, power outage, failing drive, bad sectors, or abrupt system shutdown, etc.

When a Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) array breaks or corrupts, the RAID volume becomes inaccessible, and the data is lost. But unlike normal drive, you can’t access or recover data from RAID hard drives independently. You need to reconstruct or rebuild the RAID configuration to get back lost data.

Data recovery RAID is possible, then, with RAID Recovery software by DiskInternals. The hard drive created for the RAID array contains bad sectors on Windows 10. As you know, a RAID array is set up by several hard drives. If a hard drive contains too many bad sectors, the RAID array might be corrupted and stop working normally.

However, that’s easier said than done!

RAID is a complex data storage technology that uses multiple disks to create one logical volume. While building RAID, several parameters such as a number of disks, parity, block size, block order, disk offset, file system, etc. are defined. A user must document these RAID parameters while RAID array construction as they come handy when you need to rebuild and recover data from a broken RAID.

But today we have access to some of the most powerful RAID recovery tools such as Stellar Data Recovery Technician. The tool makes RAID 0, RAID 5, and RAID 6 recovery simple and easy—even if you don’t know or remember the RAID parameters.

Steps to Broken RAID Recovery

Mentioned below are the steps that can help you recover your inaccessible and lost files by rebuilding a broken RAID 0, RAID 5, and RAID 6 set. Following are some instances where the steps will help you restore your critical files from a broken RAID:

1. A logically failed, corrupt, inaccessible, and formatted RAID
2. Broken RAID array as a result of malware or virus infection
3. Deleted or missing RAID volumes or partitions

Step 1: Stop Using the RAID Array

After RAID is broken, failed, or turned inaccessible, do not perform any hit & trial method, especially if the data is critical. The longer you use a broken RAID, the harder (and sometimes impossible) it becomes to get back data.

At least keep the usage to a minimum.

Step 2: Disconnect Hard Drives from the RAID Rack

Turn off or unplug the broken RAID set and carefully disconnect each hard drive from the RAID array. Place the drives somewhere safely.

Step 3: Use SATA/IDE Connectors to Connect Drives

After disconnecting drives from RAID 0, RAID 5, or RAID 6 array, connect each drive to a Windows PC. You can use SATA/IDE connectors or a SATA/IDE to USB 3.0 converter cable or enclosure—especially if you own a laptop or PC motherboard does not have enough SATA/IDE ports available.

Step 4: Check Disk SMART Status & Clone Failing Drive

Use a RAID recovery software such as Stellar Data Recovery Technician, which comes with a SMART disk monitoring utility. This utility helps you check the SMART disk status before recovery.

The step is most important, as you never know when a drive may fail due to some underlying problem, which might also be a reason for your broken RAID. Checking SMART status gives you a better and deeper insight about the drive. Also, if the drive is suitable for or can survive data recovery scan.

So begin by downloading, installing, and launching Stellar Data recovery Technician software. Then follow the instructions given below:

• Click ‘Monitor Drive’. Check the drive health indicators such as health, performance, and temperature.

• Everything should be green colored. If any of this is yellow or red, you need to clone the drive immediately

Steps to Clone Drive for Safe Data Recovery from a Failing RAID Drives

To clone the impending drive, you need a new or healthy hard drive of either the same or larger volume. For instance, if the failing hard drive size is 500GB, you need a drive with either 500 GB or more capacity.

• Connect the new hard drive to the system
• Then click ‘Clone Disk’ in the left pane and connect a brand new hard disk to the system
• Select the ‘Source Disk’ —the one that is failing, showing Red or Yellow warning signs in SMART status.
• Then select the ‘Target Disk’ —the new drive

Recover Drive From Mac Software Raid Windows 7

• Click ‘Clone Disk’ and Click ‘Start’ when the following warning appears to begin the cloning process

• After cloning is done, check other drives and if you see similar SMART error warnings, repeat the disk cloning steps for all other failing drives.
• Finally, connect the healthy drives to the system and disconnect the cloned impending drives

Steps to Recover Data from Broken RAID

• Close Drive Monitor. You will see the following screen

• Click ‘Recover Data’
• Click ‘All Data’ and then click ‘Next.’

• Select ‘RAID Recovery’ and click ‘Scan’. A new ‘RAID Construction’ Window appears

• Click on the respective RAID tab, i.e. RAID 0, RAID 5, or RAID 6. You will see connected RAID hard disks under ‘Select Hard drives to reconstruct RAID’ list box
• Click on RAID hard disks (one at a time) and use the arrow button to add or remove RAID drives from the ‘Select Hard drives to Reconstruct RAID’ list box to ‘Move hard drives up/down for disk order’ list box
• Arrange hard disks in sequence (sequence starts from Disk 0) by using the up or down arrow buttons located beside the list view box. Arrange them in the same order as they were in the RAID stack
• Check the ‘Don’t know start sector of drives. Show a list of probable start sectors’ checkbox: only if you don’t know the start sector of the drive. A new checklist box appears in the ‘Select RAID Parameter’ section
• Choose one or more probable start sectors or add desired start sector in the text box & click the ‘Add Sector’ button if it’s not listed in the checklist box

• Choose stripe or block size from the ‘Select Stripe/Block Size’; Select parity order or rotation from the ‘Select Parity Order/Rotation’ dropdown; and then select the parity repetition or delay from the ‘Select Parity Repetition/Delay’ dropdown. The RAID admin or user who built it knows these values
• After adding and selecting the RAID parameters in the software, click the ‘Build RAID’ button

PLEASE NOTE: In case you don’t know or remember the RAID parameters, select Don’t Know from the required parameter drop-downs and click ‘Build Raid’. The software intelligently rebuilds a few probable RAID constructions which you can choose to run a scan and get back lost data

• Wait until the software reconstructs your RAID volume. After construction is finished, constructed RAID volume (or volumes) is displayed in the ‘Select Constructed RAID’ window. Click on ‘Show Volume List’ button

• In ‘Select Volume to Recover Data’, choose the volume from the listed RAID volume – from where data is to be recovered
• TIP: In case the desired RAID volume is not listed, select ‘Physical Disk’ and click ‘Scan’ to locate the missing RAID volume and recover data (see screenshot below)

• After selecting the RAID volume, click the ‘Scan’ button. Wait until scan finishes

• If the desired files are not found in the scan results, click on blue colored ‘Click Here’ link beside Deep Scan text at the bottom of the software window to start the ‘Deep Scan’ process

Deep Scan thoroughly searches for lost files based on file-signatures and facilitates RAW data recovery by digging deep into the RAID drives. Therefore, it takes much more time than the ‘Quick Scan’ but gets back maximum recoverable data from the reconstructed RAID volume.

• In the left ‘Tree View’ pane, you can see all recovered folders and files. Use the search box on the top-right corner to search, preview, and recover specific files and folders. Alternatively, you can click on the ‘File Type’ tab to sort the recovered data

TIP: Save the scan information in your PC—weighs a few KBs. The scan information can be loaded later anytime to resume the recovery process. This saves you from scanning the RAID again. Just click on ‘Resume Recovery’ icon at the top and save the scan info at your desired location

• Click on a file to see its preview before recovery or select the check boxes of the files and folders that you want to recover

• Then click the ‘Recover’ button. A pop up appears

NOTE: If the software is not activated, it will open a web page from where you can get the activation key. Once you get the activation key delivered on your register email, enter it and proceed with further steps.

• Click the ‘Browse’ button to select the location where you want to save the recovered data. Again, make sure not to select the drive, which was in the RAID set and now connected to your PC

Use a different external disk or internal disk with enough space to save recovered data. Alternatively, you can also save the scan information and recover data in stages—as per availability of time and storage space

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• Finally, click the ‘Start Saving’ button. The selected recovered files and folders will be saved at the desired location

So that’s how you rebuild a broken RAID set for data recovery and retrieve the lost data. For more info and help on RAID recovery, comment down below or get in touch with our data recovery experts.

Conclusion

RAID is a logical arrangement of multiple disks, thus, is prone to corruption, and may break due to various factors such as power failure, abrupt system shutdown, hardware failure, or human errors, etc.

At last, it all comes to data. After all, RAID is built to store and access data without worrying about data loss due to disk failure. Also, people often consider RAID as a backup. However, RAID can never be backups as they are equally prone to corruption while being used regularly.

Thus, it’s important to have a regular copy of data, which is stored on RAID so that files can be restored without affecting the workflow and business continuity. Nevertheless, a RAID recovery software such as the Stellar Data Recovery Technician makes getting back lost files from a broken, damaged, or corrupt RAID array easier and convenient.

The software is equipped with all essentials required for safer data recovery from a broken, corrupt, or formatted RAID 0, RAID 5, and RAID 6 arrays in Windows.

Jun 08, 2020 • Filed to: Answer Hard Drive Problems • Proven solutions

Here, what you will get to know is the top 5 RAID data recovery software, what RAID is, and also the principle of RAID recovery.

• Part 1: Top 5 RAID Recovery Software
• Part 2: What Is RAID?
• Part 3: What Is RAID Recovery?

RAID hard drives are a specific component in a computer's data storage. They comprise of a few parallel disks covered in a case, actuator, actuator axis, actuator arm, platter, spindle, head, and the power and IDE connectors. It is designed to optimize the performance of data storage. Nevertheless, it is still likely to lose your important data from RAID hard drive. Read on and get the best RAID hard drive recovery software.

Part 1: Top 5 RAID Recovery Software

Data recovery from RAID drives can be easy or painful depending on the level of RAID and the nature of the RAID, a hardware RAID or a software Raid. Software RAIDs could turn out to be easy to recover in the manner that the data is stored in physically separate disks. It is not the case always. Software RAIDs could be as hard as hardware RAIDs when coming to recovering data upon a failed disk.

There have been problems and solutions. It gets even complicated when you want to pull out some data manually from a malfunctioned hard drive. If a hard drive is not RAID configured, you don't need the complicated methods to recover files from hard drive. To make it easier there are software applications which make RAID hard drive data recovery easy.

Comparison Chart for RAID Data Recovery Software

1.DiskInternals

DiskInternals RAID recovery uses a fully automated system for data recovery from RAIDs. It is not mandatory to have an automatic data recovery with this RAID hard drive data software; you can also do it yourself manually.

Advantages:

• The automatic mode allows users to sit back and let the software do it all.
• It can switch between automatic and manual modes.
• It automatically detects the type of disk array.

Disadvantages:

• The manual mode will cause the software to decide the array type based on user inputs rather than the reality.

2.GetDataBack

GetDataBack software come in two forms, one for FAT and one for NTFS file systems. You can purchase based on your need.

Advantages:

• Read only design; no accidental deletions are possible.
• Supports SSD, USB, flash cards and all hard drives.
• Supports NTFS, FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 file types.

Disadvantages:

• It tends not to work in a few PCs,especially with Windows Operating System.

3.ReclaiMe Free RAID recovery

ReclaiMe Free RAID recovery is not an entirely free data recovery software. This is a platform where you can actually see which files are available for recovery. You can decide whether you have the data you needed or not.

Advantages:

• You can view the directory, files and folders in the damaged disk for free.
• Various levels of RAID could be recovered.
• Most NAS devices are supported for data recovery.

Disadvantages:

• Once you have identified the data you needed, you will have to purchase some actual RAID hard drive data recovery software or find space in your disk to copy your data.
• Runs only on Windows Operating System.

4.Zero Assumption Recovery

This software allows you to recover data from your storage drives with various issues to solve. Raid data recovery is one of the options. This software performed a number of other functions.

Advantages:

• Recovers formatted volumes, deleted files and RAW files.
• Special recovery of digital photos.
• MBR damage recovery.

Disadvantages:

• Runs only in Windows and Linux; not in Mac
• The recovery process takes a long time and you cannot intervene in the middle of about 3 hours.

5.R-Studio Data Recovery Software

This is a collection of software initially produced by R-Tools technology. It uses some of the advanced techniques and features in data recovery today.

Advantages:

• Data pattern recognition and interpretation accordingly.
• Non standard nested levels of RAID could be recovered.
• Automatic RAID parameter recognition and consistency check.

Disadvantages:

• No guarantee to recover all lost files.
• Overwriting might occur if attempted to copy lost files to the same disks.

If your data gets lost, deleted or formatted from a normal computer hard drive, you can use Recoverit Data Recovery to retrieve them backregardless of any data loss cause. The best professional hard drive data recovery software also supports to get 500+ formats of files from a variety of data storage media, such as hard disks, external hard drives, memory card, USB flash drive, SD card, digital camera, etc.

Part 2: What Is RAID?

On the behalf of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, RAID is a technology for better performance and reliability of data storage by incorporating multiple hard drives to work in parallel. According to different needs, the RAID level can range among RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 and more.

A normal hard drive and RAID hard drive differ in the way of their function. Primary purpose of a RAID is to have data redundancy and to have better performance. The higher the redundancy, the higher the performance. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, originally known as inexpensive disks.

The functionality is achieved by the technology of combining multiple disk drives into a single logical component. The need for data redundancy and performance differ from instance to instance. So there are certain levels as to how the data redundancy and the performance would be affected. There are numbers given to the RAID mechanism to better serve the purpose. RAID 0 is the least tolerant and redundant whereas RAID 6 has two levels of error recovery.

Depending on the number for the RAID, the difficulty or easiness of the data recovery procedure will be varied. If one disk fails in a RAID 0 drives, then all the disks fail and there is no possible data recovery. It is basically a mechanism to use more than one location for data storage through parity.

The RAID mechanism could be viewed in two divisions based on the nature of the RAID in addition to the RAID numbers. There are both Hardware RAIDs and Software RAIDs.

Part 3: What Is RAID Recovery?

Normally, data recovery software is intended to recover data from a file system on various storage devices, including hard drives and removable storage media. And after a data recovery, what you can get is files and folders. However, for RAID data recovery, it is aimed to recbuild the RAID hard drive so that you can recover data from a RAID configuration, including its architecture parameters. What's essential for the RAID recovery process is to identify the RAID array.

Hardware RAID

Hardware RAID means a hardware based mechanism. The hardware is designed and incorporated to accommodate the RAID mechanism. It could either be performed through a RAID card or be built in the motherboard itself. In this type of technology, separate disks are used but the system counts them all as the same disk. The resultant capacity of the RAID drive will depend on the number of disks used and the level of RAID. Usually the higher the RAID number, the lower the resultant capacity of the disk because much space is used for parity and making data recovery much easier than the previous level. For example, if the same number of disks with the same capacity are used RAID 0, the resultant capacity will be higher than when they would be used in a RAID 6 drive.

Software RAID

Software RAID, as the name mentions, is brought about by software and there is no need for the hardware to be originally configured to be a RAID drive. In a computer system there are tools like the Device Manager to better manage every component of the hardware. The software and programming are so advanced now that we can actually manipulate the function of the hardware by advanced software. A software RAID is achieved by allocating spaces in different drives to form a virtual RAID drive. The computer will then recognize all combined spaces as one single disk or drive. In the operations of the computer, all combined components of a software RAID will be one.

Conclusion

Now you have known the basics about RAID data recovery. You can select the top 5 RAID hard drive recovery software mentioned above to start RAID recovery. If you want to recover files from hard drive, try Recoverit Data Recovery. It is a powerful hard drive data recovery tool for everyone to retrieve lost, formatted, or deleted data from any storage devices, including internal or external hard disks.

Recoverit - The Best Hard Drive Recovery Software

• Recover lost or deleted files, photos, audio, music, emails from any storage device effectively, safely and completely.
• Supports data recovery from recycle bin, hard drive, memory card, flash drive, digital camera and camcorders.
• Supports to recover data for sudden deletion, formatting, lost partition, virus attack, system crash under different situations.

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