Data recovery for RAID 5 SCSI with a dead controller in Schaerbeek
The problem
In autumn 2020, a Brussels public agency responsible for air-quality monitoring, based in Schaerbeek, entrusted us with its storage array: a TTEC Provigo 610, a SCSI RAID enclosure holding 16 disks of 500 GB, configured as three RAID 5 volumes. A short circuit on the enclosure's motherboard stopped it from booting; the disks themselves appeared intact. Without the controller, the three volumes were still unreadable: in RAID 5, each disk holds only fragments of data interleaved with parity, and none contains a complete file. The volumes held the agency's working data and archives. No urgency, but a written quote was wanted before any money was committed.
Our intervention
The written quote went out within half an hour: a fixed price per disk, the same for all sixteen, with no extras along the way, which let the agency issue its purchase order before the drop-off. The sixteen SCSI disks were taken out of the chassis and imaged sector by sector on PC-3000 Data Extractor through a SCSI controller, without ever writing to the originals. The original RAID controller was never needed again: the three volumes were rebuilt virtually in Data Extractor RAID Edition from the images. For each volume, that meant identifying which disks belonged to it, their order, the block size and the parity rotation, until the file system mounted cleanly. The data was then copied to an 8 TB external USB drive, and the client received the full directory listing of all three volumes before coming to collect them.
Result
The failure was in the enclosure's electronics, not on the disks, and that is what made a 100 % recovery possible. All three RAID 5 volumes were rebuilt in full and every file was returned, at the per-disk price fixed in the very first exchange. The client verified the content, then asked us to erase our copies, which we did.
What the client says
« Very good service. Data recovery also possible for complex (RAID) systems. Price/quality very competitive. »
Frequently asked question
RAID 5 SCSI with a dead controller: can the data be recovered?
The written quote went out within half an hour: a fixed price per disk, the same for all sixteen, with no extras along the way, which let the agency issue its purchase order before the drop-off. The sixteen SCSI disks were taken out of the chassis and imaged sector by sector on PC-3000 Data Extractor through a SCSI controller, without ever writing to the originals. The original RAID controller was never needed again: the three volumes were rebuilt virtually in Data Extractor RAID Edition from the images. For each volume, that meant identifying which disks belonged to it, their order, the block size and the parity rotation, until the file system mounted cleanly. The data was then copied to an 8 TB external USB drive, and the client received the full directory listing of all three volumes before coming to collect them. The failure was in the enclosure's electronics, not on the disks, and that is what made a 100 % recovery possible. All three RAID 5 volumes were rebuilt in full and every file was returned, at the per-disk price fixed in the very first exchange. The client verified the content, then asked us to erase our copies, which we did.
Related service: RAID data recovery