Raid Data Recovery for a PERC2 Dell Poweredge 2850 Windows Server

Original Dell Poweredge 2850 Server setup on arrival at our Raid Data Recovery lab

• Hard Drive ID0: Maxtor Atlas 10K model 8J073J0 69.8GB was in PERC Bios as A0-3 (offline)
• Hard Drive ID1: Maxtor Atlas 10K model 8J073J0 69.8GB was in PERC Bios as A0-1 (READY)
• Hard Drive ID2: Maxtor Atlas 10K model 8J073J0 70.1GB was in PERC Bios as A0-2 (READY)
• Hard Drive ID3: Maxtor Atlas 10K model 8J073J0 70.1GB was in PERC Bios as A0-0 (READY)
• Hard Drive ID4: Maxtor Atlas 10K model 8J073J0 70.1GB was in PERC Bios as A0-5 (offline)
• Hard Drive ID5: Maxtor Atlas 10K model 8J073J0 70.1GB was in PERC Bios as not assigned (READY)

Customer comments on the Events leading to the DELL PERC2 RAID Array Failure.

• Dell poweredge 2850 raid server is a Windows 2000 web server running good for 5 years
• 2 Partitions, Boot partition about 80GB and Data partition over 200GB
• The boot partition was getting full.
• I.T. started to delete useless files from the boot partition to liberate some space.
• During this operation, the Dell Server locked up.
• Dell server was rebooted but would no longer access Windows.

Recovering the RAID DATA

• The block size in a standard Perc Raid configuration is usually 64K (128 Sectors).
• Get yourself a nice free hex editor such as WinHex, you only have to pay if you add additional features.
• Search the first hard drive for a file that has recognizable data structure. Try sector 128, 256...n until you find some webpage or some other text that is continuous.