The problem
One of the largest online marketing services providers – holding sales contact data for more than 1,500 businesses – called ACE after numerous unsuccessful attempts to bring their HP StorageWorks MSA2000 array back online. The RAID configuration had been lost.
The challenge
RAID configuration is stored in the controller’s NVRAM or on the array’s drives. After a power surge, that configuration can disappear. In this case, after the config was lost, the customer made two attempts to re-initialize the array – as RAID 6. The first attempt failed due to a physical drive issue. The second attempt succeeded – wrongly creating a RAID 6 over the original data and rendering the original configuration, in effect, lost.
Our approach
- Diagnostics showed the array was originally configured as two RAID 10 logical drives spread across the whole array.
- We repaired the failed drive and extracted its raw data.
- Our engineers developed a custom application to eliminate the “derelict” parity stripes created by the second RAID 6 initialization. In this case, 4 clusters per stripe had been overwritten with RAID 6 parity data (a typical recovery tolerates only one missing drive).
- The application relocated good clusters from the corresponding locations inside both halves of the mirrored RAID 10 sets.
The result
100% of the client’s data recovered – thanks to the redundant clusters of the RAID 10 mirror configuration and our custom tooling. The data of more than 1,500 businesses was restored.
Facing a misconfigured or rebuilt array? Call 844-223-7243 – engineers answer 24/7 – or start a case online. Free evaluation, no data, no fee. Learn more about RAID data recovery.
ACE RAID Recovery · Toll-free 844-223-7243 · Dallas · Houston · Chicago