Degraded for months, then the second disk quit twenty minutes into the rebuild — or the controller failed and its configuration vanished with it. RAID array recovery is a fixture of this bench: sets at RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 out of servers, workstations and NAS units across Swindon and the M4 corridor, imaged first and reconstructed virtually, with business-down cases moved to the head of the queue — including urgent RAID server data recovery for Wiltshire businesses.
Free diagnostic on every raid array job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Every raid array job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twenty cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
One loss is designed for; the rebuild then kills the weakest survivor — the defining disaster of RAID array recovery.
A half-run rebuild poisons the parity it relied on; the reach of the damage is mapped from the images.
A dead card takes the configuration to the grave — geometry is re-derived from the members with no card required.
A member carrying months-old data gets forced back in, and the file system tears itself apart on the mismatch.
Someone built a fresh array on top of the old — halt it before initialisation runs its course and plenty survives.
One surge fells several members at once; every drive gets its own repair and its own capture before the arithmetic starts.
Whole banks of drives 'fail' together when the chassis wiring is the true casualty — so diagnosis comes before alarm.
The stripe maths is perfect; the NTFS, ext4 or VMFS on top isn't — parser-level rebuild wins it.
Definitions removed in error come back while the blocks they described stay intact.
Flat cache batteries plus a power cut desynchronise parity from data — reconciled at image level.
An H710 or P420 dies with the definition aboard — the layout is recovered from the members, no replacement card needed.
A member with dead heads visits the clean bench first, then joins the imaging queue with the others.
Same-batch ST8000VN004s in small-business arrays age together — parallel imaging beats the second failure to the punch.
Software arrays shed superblocks and pool metadata — rebuilt from the raw members, structure by structure.
A member remapping sectors daily is failing in slow motion; catching it at imaging time rescues the whole set.
Losing both halves of one mirror beats the redundancy — yet lab imaging often revives one half enough to close the stripe.
The automatic rebuild lands on a spare that's been spinning idle for years — and dying quietly the whole time.
An 'import foreign configuration' click against the wrong metadata scrambles the set — the true layout is recovered from the drives.
Blues and Barracudas without error-recovery limits drop from arrays under load — imaged patiently, then the set rebuilt.
Power loss corrupts pool metadata on hypervisor builds — walked back through transaction history from full member images.
Before anyone theorises, each member drive is captured in its entirety, and the originals never spin inside an array again. The geometry — member order, stripe size, rotation, parity offset — is deduced from those captures, the volume is stood up virtually on top, and the file system is walked from that assembly. Stale members inside a RAID 5, RAID 6 double losses, nested 10s and controllers that forgot everything: that's an ordinary week of RAID array recovery here.
Forcing an offline member back into the set, rebuilding onto a disk that's already dying, and letting someone try one final experiment — those three turn salvageable arrays into scrap far more often than the original fault does. If your array is down: power off, mark every drive with its bay, and pick up the phone. Tell us the business is stopped and the assessment jumps the queue the day the drives arrive.
RAID array recovery runs on one non-negotiable rule — image everything first — and this bench enforces it:
Every member drive is captured simultaneously on dedicated hardware before analysis — originals never rejoin any rebuild.
Works on the images to solve member order, stripe size, rotation and offsets, then mounts the assembled array virtually.
A failed member gets full hard-drive treatment — heads, firmware, electronics — so it can be imaged alongside the healthy ones.
Entropy and parity checks prove the solved geometry before a single file is lifted from the assembled volume.
NTFS, ReFS, ext4, XFS, BTRFS and VMFS opened natively — virtual machine disks stored on top included.
Member imaging is read-only by physical enforcement; the drives return to you untouched.
Hardware card, software layer or chipset RAID — the geometry lives on the member drives, and the members are the source it gets read from. PERC and Smart Array cards have a habit of dying with the definition still aboard, matched-batch NAS drives like the ST8000VN004 have a habit of failing in formation, and desktop-grade members drop out of sets under load — three different roads to the same bench, all ending in parallel imaging on arrival day.
Power the server or shelf down before touching anything, then mark each member with its slot while it comes out — reconstruction leans on the original order being known. Only labelled drives travel; the controller and chassis remain at yours, and a phone snap of the bays as they stood is worth taking.
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.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.