cjmarkley

i have a terabite external hard drive with 4 250gig sata drives in it with a RAID5 configuration it was accidentally formatted and my number 3 drive went out and i need help recovering files from it, need serious help only things i absolutely need recovered are picture files that did not belong to me and will never here the end of it since the where the only ones that she had and not replaceable

raptor_pa

Rebuilding raids is not the easiest thing in the world, part of the issue is that it was formatted, then with the missing drive it is compounded. Safest way to go on this would be to send it to a pro, downside is you are talking a minimum of probably $3500 dollars. Rebuilding the raid since it was formatted won't do anygood, so your best bet is to try r-studio to reassemble a virtual raid. Do you know what the drive order was, the strip size and the parity direction? If so then you could reassemble the raid virtually in r-studio, mark disk 3 as missing and let it reassemble the virtual raid, then you can copy out the files to another disk. You won't be able to write the recovered files out to the existing raid volume since it is broken, and with being formatted the data you were writing could overwrite some of the data you would be recovering. Here is a good video on raid recovery using r-studio. It's about an hour long but shows you how it works. http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=v...ight-and-sound the best I can say is good luck, as an alternative tool you could try raid reconstructor, tho I find r-studio easier. X-Ways forensics also has a great raid tool, but it's $1000 piece of software...