Corrupt Files

[TwistedAdmin]

I have a client that scans a lot of documents (100+ GB over the last two years) from a multi-function copier. These documents are scanned to a PC that has a 4-bay HDD enclosure attached via eSATA (PCI add-in card facilitates this connection as it is not native on the motherboard). The 4 bays contain 4x 1TB hard drives, 3 of which are configured for RAID 0, the other off-line as a spare.

Something occurred in the last couple of business days with either the host PC operating system (XP) or the HDD enclosure/drives where the device stopped showing up as a valid drive. In Disk Manager the drive showed up and looked as though it had not been initialized. A reboot of the PC returned the drive to the list as a valid drive. A check of the enclosure software reported all three RAID 0 drives as nominal. CHKDSK was run after a subsequent reboot of the PC and reported no errors.

However, upon inspection, it seems that a good number of files now report as damaged or corrupt when an attempt to open them is made (PDF, Excel, Word, etc). A 1TB external drive (allocated for off-site storage) was set up for the customer as a weekly/monthly backup of the HDD enclosure unit, however, they have failed to actually run the backup since March of 2010.

Anti-virus and anti-spyware scans come up clean.

Any advice? What would cause something like this? Methods of repairing damaged/corrupt files? Known/reputable data recovery specialist/services?


Thanks & Regards


[ A+ Certified, Net+ Certified ]

"Old men are always young enough to learn."

~ Aeschylus

 

[TwistedAdmin]

Closing my own thread.

This was remedied by going to a command prompt and entering

CHKDSK F: /R

Substitute F: for whatever drive you need to work on.

This should have worked the first time I ran it... not sure why it didn't (other than perhaps having used the wrong drive letter??).


[ A+ Certified, Net+ Certified ]

"Old men are always young enough to learn."

~ Aeschylus

 

[goombawaho]

You probably had a hard drive/RAID "hiccup" event. The real question is why that would have happened.

Have you run the manufacturer's diagnostic tool on each drive in the array (one at a time). Yes, it would be a huge pain to do this.

Do you ever run the RAID "verification" tool also called an Array Synchronization?

 

[LeeMason]

It seems a bit of a risky configuration to have a RAID 0 for the data and no valid backup. It might be good to buy a low cost NAS device and maybe use something like rsync or robocopy to make a copy of the data on a scheduled basis. This obviously won't help in terms of offsite copies being kept but at least it will mean you have a backup copy onsite to go back to in case of hardware failure.


Lee Mason
Optimal Projects Ltd

http://www.opl.co.uk

http://www.backupsanywhere.com

 

[goombawaho]

Understatement of the year so far - "It seems a bit of a risky configuration to have a RAID 0 for the data and no valid backup."

Yeah, I was wondering why RAID 0 - speed obviously, but for a network storage device maybe not the best choice.

They have a backup in place, it just wasn't working (smile). Very similar to "I was going to stop on my fifth drink, but then I didn't".