Hardware and RAID configuration

This was an 8x750GB drive RAID 5 holding two HFS+ partitions.

Problem:

The RAID controller failed. The drives were removed from the server. Information about the RAID controller was not available.

Diagnosis:

• All drives appeared fine. Data and parity data were intact.
• The second HFS+ partition was found with key file system structures intact.
• Only fragments of the file system structures could be located for the first partition.

Solution:

• We reconstructed the RAID using all drives.
• We used File Scavenger® to recover data from the second (good) HFS+ partition.
• For the first (corrupted) partition we gathered all found fragments containing the file system structure. With this information we were able to interpolate the location of the HFS+ partition and to recreate key directory structures.

Result:

• The second HFS+ partition was completely recovered.
• Most data on the first HFS+ partition was recovered.