I have been working with company X to try to recover a NAS for the last week.  A little background might help to understand the circus I work in.

First, there is no backup for this NAS.  Both the owner (I am just support) and my Boss decided that was too expensive (for those who have read me, my boss is a pissant that likes to piss off people and if he is mad at you, will give you bad advice).  Second, ignoring my pleas to get this NAS on a UPS, the Owner hemmed and hawed and has not done so.  Third, this NAS is in a location with very dirty power.  The NAS has gone down several times in the past. (It is a testament to the Company X that it had gone down umpteen times and come back up, unscathed, umpteen minus 1).

So now you have the scenario.  Yes, it went down again, and this time would not come back.  No matter what we tried.  BSOD here, BSOD there, BSOD everywhere (including the recovery volume).  So I pulled it back to HQ and started working on it.  And I could not recover any data.  BSOD.  So I started the re-install.  But - Register dump (old timers, remember them?  What would you blame it on?).

But Tech from Company X first replaced one drive, then replaced half the internals.  Then replaced the other half - including......Dut-ta-da-da! - The CPU!  And Shazaam!  The register dumps went away.

But alas the data was not there.  before we had started on the path of reinstall, one volume was saying it was corrupted, and one volume said "unformatted".  Not good.  So we re-install on one drive (the new one) and when done, we put the other drives back in.  Alas, that one failed attempt at restoring it (before the CPU was replaced) had left all the drive info (and the raid info - did I mention it was a software RAID? - Stay away!) gone.  But through a program we were able to restore the partitioning information and Shazaam!  We got all the data off one of the volumes! Except one file (it was a form fortunately).

But the other one was still 'unformatted'.  So they tried some more.  And succeeded in basically wiping out all the previous work and leaving these drives as bare as a newborn's bottom.

So I say "if we restore the partitions exactly as they were before, and then dry a drive scan program to undelete the files, you think that would work?".  NOPE!

So after bidding them good bye as they had accomplished their task, I decided to give it a try.  So I Made a striped volume (instead of a RAID 5 one) out of the part of the drives that we had not been able to recover, did a quick format (the only thing that does is wipe out the root file information), and then ran the program.

Guess what!  It found every stinking file!  Took a couple of hours, but it found every one!  I was able to recover all 2 that were on that volume (the users did not even know what was there!), and then wiped it and recreated the Raid 5 volume.

So the Moral of the story is, when they tell you no, don't believe them.  Sometimes we know more than they do.  At least us old timers that have used Gibson before.

Sometimes the tech does not know every thing.  But I did learn a lot of secrets this time around!  And will let the tech know that I did what I suggested and it worked!

(But I knew it would after it was 10% done and found files from August 2004 - when the NAS was into service!).