More RAID 5 volumes are lost to the rescue attempt than to the original fault — a rebuild forced onto worn survivors, a 'repair' that rewrote the metadata. Our approach removes the risk: every member imaged first, the array reassembled in software, originals never written to.
No RAID case is quoted blind. Free diagnostic first, then one written figure — from £500 + VAT by member count, with logical rebuilds covered by no fix, no fee.
Losing one disk is the situation RAID 5 was designed for. Losing the plot afterwards is what fills our bench — these are the endings we see from Wiltshire server rooms.
The replacement disk goes in, the rebuild grinds every ageing survivor for hours, and one of them quits before it finishes. Degraded becomes dead in an afternoon — the single most common RAID 5 emergency we take.
Controllers, HBAs and backplanes fail more gracelessly than the disks they serve. The members can be fine while the volume stays dark, until the layout and parity records are recovered from the member disks themselves.
A member that dropped out weeks ago holds a frozen snapshot. Force it back in and the controller stitches stale stripes into live ones, corrupting parity across the whole set.
Parity absorbs a read error on one member; matching errors on two leave holes it cannot fill. We image around every fragile patch on every disk before a single stripe is reassembled.
'Repair', re-create and initialise buttons can quietly overwrite the metadata that records where your data actually sits. If one has been pressed, stop pressing.
Adding a disk or migrating RAID level is a marathon operation. Interrupt it — power cut, crash, impatience — and the set is stranded between two layouts, mountable as neither.
Your original members never spin inside a live array again. Each disk is read out sector by sector on dedicated imaging hardware — after clean-room repair where a member has physically failed — and everything that follows happens to the copies. From those images we establish the disk order, stripe width, rotation and parity direction, assemble the volume virtually, and lift your files off it, with the untouched originals held back as the final safety net.
Slotting in a spare and letting the controller have another go feels like progress. On a set that has already spent its redundancy, it is the most dangerous button in the building: the rebuild flogs the surviving disks precisely when they are weakest, and one more failure converts a routine job into a long one. If a rebuild has stalled or errored, power down and leave the machine off.
Most of the RAID array recovery cases we take carry the day-to-day storage of a small firm — HP ProLiant and Dell PowerEdge machines, the odd self-assembled tower, and NAS units from Synology, QNAP and Netgear — arriving from Swindon, Chippenham, Cirencester and Royal Wootton Bassett. The member disks travel to our Oxford location, under an hour up the A420 or overnight by tracked post, and business-critical sets can jump the bench queue. The wider service is described under RAID recovery and NAS recovery, with the numbers on the data recovery cost page.
Power off, send the members, and we'll reassemble the set in software — written quote before any work.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Oxford Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.