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RAID 5 Data Recovery

WINDOWS 2008 SERVER RAID 5:

I am looking for help with a Windows 2008 server running 3 disks on a raid 5 array. The server is experiencing a lot of slowness and delays on the system, and I am not able to get into the data and folders that I have saved on the drives. When I look in BIOS, I can see these drives are almost full, so I decided to add some more capacity by installing another 3 drives to the system, with more GB of space on these drives. The problem is that when I put the drives into the array, I can see a message appear on the screen which says that the new drives need to be reformatted. However, the machine isn’t listing the additional drives, but those which I have had on the system for a long time, and which contain a lot of data. The computer is even showing how much data is stored on the drive, but still wants me to format them. When I took out the new drives, and tried to view the others through Windows desktop, I saw that the drives are now labelled as uninitialized. I am concerned that I may have lost the data which has been on the drives for some time.

DELL POWEREDGE 1600 RAID 5:

I need some help with a RAID 5 array which is connected to a Dell PowerEdge server. The server is experiencing some problems, and won’t mount a new hard drive. I recently had a problem which meant that I had to replace one of the drives, and I want to do a rebuild in order to recover the data. I removed the failed drive on the advice of the Dell techs, and tried to install a new one. We simply replaced it and waited for the computer to try a rebuild, but this hasn’t happened. The BIOS which recognises the array won’t see the new drive, and the RAID 5 system won’t start up the rebuild because it thinks that it is missing a drive, according to its message. I have a lot of data on the server that I wanted to save.