RAID 5 FAilure recovery! Need help ASAP!

[Frankenherder]

Long story short, a non tech person was on the phone with Dell. They were supposed to swap redundant power supplies. Instead he pulled 2 HD's out of a RAID 5 config of 3 drives and swapped them into eachothers previous bay.

Needless to say, Blue screen server appears pooched. Was going to do a RE and Re and use data back up to restore but there was a problem with them cancelling jobs and there is no Exchange server back up.

Question:
1. Can I replace the 2 drives in their original Bays and turn it on and the system will self restore?
or 2. Will that make things worse and prevent possible data recovery?
3. Has anyone successfully used a data recovery service to resolve this type of situation? If so, did you just get your data back or could they repair the RAID and you just replaced the drives and turned on?

Thanks in advance, it has been a long night so please excuse my typos.

Matt

 

[PaulGillespie]

Put both drives in their original slots and see what happens. I don't think it can do any harm now.

Good luck.

 

[jkupski]

Hopefully, the thing just flat out died when he pulled the drives and no data was overwritten. If that's the case, you probably have a decent chance of success.

It's as broke as it's going to get--there's no harm in moving the drives back to their original bays and praying that it solves the problem. I don't believe that there would be a siginificant impact on data recovery efforts. By the way, if you go the data recovery route, expect it to cost... ALOT.

 

[Frankenherder]

The server and drives are getting recovered.

I am told that when one drive is pulled it will degrade the RAID. When the second was pulled, it crashed the system. When they were put back in the wrong slots, the drives may have tried to rebuild but would have failed since the parity alogorithym is messed up since there are 2 drives involved. There is a possibility that something was written to these drives in that time and that may have created a "newer parity" on another drive that may screw everything up.

I got some quotes from 1K to look at it to 7700 - 20K to recover. I found another location much, much cheaper. They deal in data destruction and data recover over the last 3 years. I figure if they can destroy it, they can fix it. They are optimistic they can slave to each drive, clean it up and have the server boot as normal again.

I will keep you posted and provide contact info if I am happy with this company incase someone else has a similar issue.

Matt

 

[PaulGillespie]

Good luck mate, hope it works out.

 

[skialta]

Was this either Drive Savers or Ontrack? I've used Ontrack a few times, expensive but good at what they do.

 

[Frankenherder]

sorry, found a shop, they charged me 800 bucks cdn. Full server recovery, did not even need to re and re.

Matt