A Dell PowerEdge 2600 — an older server built on SCSI drives — lost its RAID 5 after a second disk failed, taking the company's shared files and accounts with it. We imaged every SCSI member on the right hardware and reconstructed the array offline to recover the data.
The PowerEdge had run the office's shared files and accounts for years on a RAID 5 across several SCSI drives. It had quietly lost a disk and kept going in a degraded state until a second drive failed, at which point the array dropped and the server would no longer boot. Backups were out of date. Because a RAID 5 can only survive one failed member, a second failure meant no more automatic recovery, so the disks were removed and brought in rather than the controller being asked to rebuild.
The 2600 pre-dates the SATA and SAS drives most modern equipment uses; it runs parallel SCSI disks through a Dell PERC RAID controller. Imaging those drives takes the right vintage SCSI controllers and cabling — they can't simply be plugged into a modern machine. On top of the drives sits the RAID 5 itself: data striped across the members with distributed parity, laid out in the particular way the PERC controller organises it, which has to be worked out to reassemble the array correctly.
Each SCSI disk was imaged individually on appropriate hardware. Members that read cleanly were cloned in full; any with weak areas — unsurprising on drives of this age — were imaged adaptively, securing the healthy majority first. Working from images of every drive meant the array could be reconstructed and checked without further stressing the ageing originals.
The RAID 5 parameters — stripe size, parity rotation, disk order and start offset — were derived by analysing the raw images, using parity relationships and known file-system structures to confirm the map, and the controller's corrupted metadata was ignored. The array was rebuilt in software, and because images of all members were available, parity was used to check and correct rather than blindly trusted, so the data lost with the failed drives was reconstructed wherever the surviving disks and parity allowed.
The accounts and shared files were opened and checked across the recovered volume to confirm they were intact, then returned on fresh storage. About 97% came back. We were direct about the moral every degraded array carries: a RAID protects against one failure, not against being left unattended — a failed member needs acting on at once, and an up-to-date backup remains essential.
SCSI imaging on appropriate vintage controllers · adaptive imaging of ageing drives · stripe, parity and disk-order reconstruction with PC-3000 RAID and Atola Insight. All imaging read-only, work carried out in-house in Belfast.
Send it to us for a free, no-obligation diagnostic. We’ll tell you what can be recovered and put a fixed price in writing before any work starts — and on most jobs, if we can’t get your data back, there’s nothing to pay. Post your device in, or drop it to us by appointment.
Yes — including older parallel-SCSI arrays that need vintage controllers to read. We image every member on the right hardware and reconstruct the RAID in software. Send all the disks, labelled with their slot order, including any that failed.
Possibly. A second failure stops the array rebuilding itself, but if the failed disks can be imaged, even partially, the array can often be reconstructed offline with most of the data intact. Don't let the controller attempt a rebuild.
RAID and server recoveries start from £500 plus VAT, with a fixed written quote after a free diagnostic. Physical repairs carry a deposit toward parts and bench time.