Hardware and RAID configuration

There were 2x1TB drives from a Windows Server computer. The customer reported that Disk Extender (i.e., DiskXtender) was used.

Problem:

The drives had some bad sectors and data was not accessible.

Diagnosis:

• The hardware sector problem was resolved by cloning the drives to new blank drives. Data was recovered from the clone drives.
• An analysis of the file system metadata did not show any problem. The key metadata structures were intact. However, the actual recovery did not go well. Only about 50% of the data could not be restored.
• Further investigation found a rarely-used attribute of NTFS to implement symbolic links or soft links in other file systems such as ext3 and ext4. File Scavenger® could not restore the files that were a symbolic link to another file.

Solution:

• Restored all files.
• If a file is merely a symbolic link, follow the link to restore the actual file.

Result:

All data was completely restored.