I have Raid 5 on my system furnished, consisting of 3x WD 500. It ran up to now wonderfully. I have a lost partition in this RAID 5 array with lot of important stuffs. Please help me in RAID 5 Array Recovery. Also suggest me an appropriate data recovery tool for recovery.

Hard drive failure is a very disastrous situation and the situation becomes more complicated if the failed hard drive is a member of a RAID array. RAID 5 is a redundant hard drive array that uses at least 3 hard drives to securely duplicate and manage your data.

Don’t panic, recovering data from this complicated Raid array situation is possible with data recovery software. If a partition has been lost, it is possible to restore the data using Windows Data Recovery Software from the redundant drives in the array.

Let us discuss how Windows data recovery software recovers data from this lost partition of RAID 5 array.

You will have to install the software on a completely different PC with a safe Windows build. Let us call the RAID array, “machine A” and the other PC “machine B”. Now attach machine A, the RAID array, to machine B. Make sure that the drives in the raid are attached in the same order they were when the partition was lost.

Use Windows Data Recovery on machine B to scan for lost partitions on machine A. the application will thoroughly scan the RAID 5 array and present you with a view of the partition and respective files and folders in a data tree view. Select the files and folders and recover them all. Make sure you use Windows Data Recovery to search for your lost partition and not your original installation disks (System Recovery CD / DVD, which is generally shipped with your hardware). Those disks will only restore systems to their initial configuration. This can cause more problems than it will solve.

Remo Recover (Windows) – Pro edition CAN be used to recover data from a drive that has been reformatted or modified with new partitions. Remo Recover (Windows) – Pro Edition is a competent recovery suite, with its ability ranging from simple undelete operation to recovery of lost partitions and logically corrupted drives along with recovering lost photos, videos and audio files.

Follow the instructions in the tutorial below to recover data from your lost partition.

Step 1: Start the Remo Recover Main application. Click on Remo Recover – Advance option. Select NTFS Partition Recovery. The application main window will be displayed as shown in figure a.

Figure a: Application Main Window

   

Step 2: From the application main window select “Recover your Data” option and click on “Next” button to continue. As you click “Next” button, a window will be displayed to select the source disk from which you wish to recover your data (see Figure b).

Figure b: Select source disk

     

Step 3: Select a source drive and the processing mode to process the drive. The software provides two processing modes: Display default partitions and Search for lost partitions

By default the processing mode is set to “Display default partitions”. Select “Search for lost partitions”. As you click on “Next” button, the application analyses the drive and lists all the found partitions in the partition table as shown in Figure c.

Figure c: Partition Table

    

Step 4: Select a partition for processing and click Finish button. The application processes the partition and displays the found files and folders in a tree structure as shown in Figure d.

Figure d: Found files and folders

Now the final step is to restore data to safe location. You can also preview the file before recovery. Simply double click the file displayed in the tree structure to see its preview.

  

Step 5: To recover data to a safe destination location just select the file and click “Save” button. If you want to recover whole tree structure formed, click root folder to mark whole data and click on “Save All”. A window to select destination location is displayed as shown in Figure e.

Figure e: Select local drive

Select a logical drive in your local disk where you wish to save the data. Specify the file type you wish to ignore (file filter) while saving process. This will filter the file types which you don’t want to recover. As you click on ‘OK’ button, the program starts saving the data to specified destination location in your local drive.

Make sure you do not save the recovered data to the same location from where you are recovering; this may lead to permanent data loss.

Tags: hard drive partition recovery, partition recovery, raid 5 array recovery, raid recovery, raid recovery software, recover lost data