Taking work now — the first look is freeWhole sets posted in from anywhere in the UK, or handed in at ten drop-off pointsQuicker still, give us a ring:0800 6890668
RARRAID Array Data Recovery 0800 6890668 Price my job
RAR / Casebook

Jobs closed · written up after

The casebook. Closed jobs, described exactly as they ran.

Approval governs all of it. Nothing is published until the customer has been through the recovered material and told us to go ahead, and at that point every identifying detail comes out: the person, the firm, the town, the serial numbers. Each entry then points to the page dealing with that class of fault, for anyone wanting method rather than narrative. The entries below are illustrative examples written to show the shape a casebook entry takes; they are marked as such and will be replaced by genuine closed jobs as they are approved for publication.

Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
0800 6890668

Most recent at the top.

Also shown on the home page →
UK · RAR-2026-0601JOB LOGGED ✓

A six-drive RAID 5 on a PERC H730, one member failed, a second dropped at 61 per cent of the rebuild, and the virtual disk marked Failed with a firm's file server on it

The owner powered down and sent all six drives, including the first to fail. The two dropped members were imaged, one after a head swap and the other slowly; the DDF metadata gave the order and a 64KB stripe, parity across the images confirmed it, and the set was assembled from the four survivors and the newer failed member, with the first-dropped drive's stripes used where the other could not read. The NTFS volume mounted from the virtual array.

99.98% of the volume recovered8 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case
UK · RAR-2026-0616JOB LOGGED ✓

A DL380 Gen8 with a P420i that stopped at 1779 after a drive that had failed in April was reseated in July, and an engineer who pressed F2 to get the server up

The logical drive came up with April's data in one member's stripes and ran for a day before the corruption was noticed. The RIS metadata on the images identified the reseated drive as three months stale; the five current members were assembled in software and the NTFS volume repaired from its journal, with the day's damage limited to files written after F2.

99.9% of the volume recovered8 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case
UK · RAR-2026-0606JOB LOGGED ✓

A twenty-four-drive RAID 60 in an MD1400 behind a PERC H840, an expander failure that dropped the shelf, and a clear of the foreign configuration by an engineer who wanted the server to boot

Every drive was healthy and no initialisation had run. All twenty-four were imaged, parity and Q computed across candidate groups to sort the members into their two spans and prove each span's geometry, and the span stripe found from the file system's anchors. The set was assembled in software and the file server's volume copied out.

100% of the volume recovered14 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case
UK · RAR-2026-0621JOB LOGGED ✓

A Proxmox host's six-drive RAID-Z2 pool, SUSPENDED after a power cut, then FAULTED with insufficient replicas when two devices came back UNAVAIL, and an owner who had read about -F and stopped short of typing it

The two UNAVAIL devices had damaged labels at the start of the disk; their end labels were intact and read from the images. The pool was opened read-only from the images at the newest uberblock every member agreed on, two transaction groups behind the survivors' newest, and the datasets and zvols copied out. The two lost groups amounted to seconds of writes.

99.99% of the pool recovered8 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case
UK · RAR-2026-0610JOB LOGGED ✓

A six-drive mdadm RAID 5 on an Ubuntu server, two members kicked as non-fresh after a power cut, --assemble --force tried, then --create with the wrong chunk size, and an XFS volume that would not mount

The --create had written new 1.2 superblocks with a 512K chunk and a 128MiB data offset over an array built with a 64K chunk and an older offset. The original geometry was recovered from parity across the images and the true offset from where the XFS superblock actually sat; the stale members were found from a 0.90 superblock still readable at the end of the devices from the array's first life. The volume mounted read-only.

99.9% of the volume recovered9 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case
UK · RAR-2026-0622JOB LOGGED ✓

A five-disk parity space on Windows Server 2016, one disk retired, a second showing warnings, a repair started by Windows, and the virtual disk gone to No redundancy before it finished

The two retired disks were imaged; the pool database was read from every image and the newest consistent copy chosen, giving three columns, a 256KB interleave and the slab map. The virtual disk was assembled from the slabs in software with the first-retired disk's slabs filling what the second could not read, and the ReFS volume opened read-only.

99.99% of the volume recovered9 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case
UK · RAR-2026-0633JOB LOGGED ✓

An ESXi 7 host on a PERC H730 whose RAID 5 datastore went Failed when a second drive dropped during a rebuild, holding nine virtual machines including a domain controller and a SQL Server

The set was reassembled from the images with the first-dropped drive's stripes filling what the rebuild had not reached; the VMFS 6 volume was opened read-only and its journal replayed; the nine VMDKs were extracted with their snapshot chains and each guest's file system checked. The SQL Server's database was recovered from its log inside its extracted disk.

100% of the datastore recovered11 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case
UK · RAR-2026-0618JOB LOGGED ✓

A MegaRAID 9361-8i whose RAID 5 went offline when a backplane dropped three drives, holding a Hyper-V host's CSV, with pinned cache and a controller that would not boot

The owner did not discard it. The backplane fault had dropped three healthy members at once and the DDF was intact; the set was assembled in software and the CSV examined on a copy, where the pinned cache had held the last seconds of writes to two VHDX files. Their guest file systems were repaired from their journals on extracted copies.

99.99% of the CSV recovered9 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case
UK · RAR-2026-0603JOB LOGGED ✓

A four-drive RAID 10 on a Smart Array P440ar holding a SQL Server instance, one half of a pair failed in March and the other in June, unnoticed until the logical drive went offline

Both halves of the failed pair were imaged, the June drive after a head swap; its data was current and the March drive's three months stale. The pairing and stripe were read from the RIS metadata, the set assembled from the two healthy members and the June image, and the March image used only for stripes the June drive could not read. The database was repaired from its log.

99.99% of the database recovered7 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case
UK · RAR-2026-0623JOB LOGGED ✓

A four-host vSAN cluster on FTT=1 that lost a host to a failed motherboard and, forty minutes later, a capacity device on a second host, leaving a dozen objects Inaccessible

Sixteen devices came in labelled by host and slot. The components were located from vSAN's metadata on the images, each object reassembled from its current mirror components with stale ones used only where nothing else held the block, and the twelve VMDKs extracted and their guest file systems opened. The cluster was resynced from the extracted disks.

100% of the objects recovered14 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case
UK · RAR-2026-0615JOB LOGGED ✓

An R730 whose PERC H730 was replaced under warranty with a card on newer firmware, 'Virtual disk import failed' on every boot, and an engineer who suggested clearing to get the server up

The owner declined and sent the eight drives and both controllers. The DDF metadata on the drives was intact and consistent; the new card's firmware had refused it. The set was assembled in software from the images with the geometry read straight from the description, and the drives went back with a note about matching the firmware before the set was reimported.

100% of the volume recovered6 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case
UK · RAR-2026-0608JOB LOGGED ✓

A five-bay Synology in SHR-2 with two 8TB and three 4TB drives, two members failed, the pool Crashed, and the owner told by the dashboard that it could no longer be repaired

Three md arrays were found across the partitions: a RAID 6 across five 4TB partitions and two smaller arrays across the 8TB drives' extra space. Each was assembled from the images with event counts choosing the current members, the LVM group joined from them, and the Btrfs volume opened read-only. The shares were copied out.

100% of the volume recovered8 days here, and back by post
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine case

Yours could be next on the list, or not, as you prefer.

Nothing is published without your say-so. The first look is free either way.

0800 6890668

Price my jobPacking and posting