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All servers flooded by salt water, is it possible to recover data from multi-platter drives?

I am an individual user of HP P212/Zero Memory Smart Array Controller and I have a RAID5 on it.

This Raid5 contains 6 Seagate 2TB SATA Hard Drives, no hotspare. It is working with a battery and 256MB RAM.

Just now there were 2 hard drives (The last 2 drives in the array) lost from the array by unknown accident. But I am sure that the 6 disks are all working well by themselves. They should not be broken or damaged.

I restarted the computer and the 2 drives were back into the controller while the logical drive (the raid5 array) still showed loss. In the control panel there is only option to delete the previous array to build a new one.

However, I cannot lose my data (about 9TB). I hope to find a way to recover this RAID5 with my data preserved.

I know, as the data were not damaged - just lost connection from the controller, there is a common solution that I need to mirror all the disks using some software like WinHex and rebuild the array on software platform and get all the mirror copied, but this solution requires skills on dealing with partition tables which I am not good at yet. I hope to get some help before taking such risks.

What about R-Studio? Do I need to disconnect the disks from the P212 controller and connect them with my motherboard to access them as single drives?

I wish professionals working on server storage technologies could help me with some good solutions.

Thank you very much.

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    You have 9 terabytes of data and no backup. This is where you pay for your mistakes. If anything will save you, it will be a professional data recovery service and it will cost your dearly.
    – Jeff Ferland
    Nov 27, 2012 at 19:45
  • I wish professionals working on server storage technologies could help me with some good solutions. I'm sure some will, but not free. If you can't remount the array manually, you're looking at data loss, and a lot of it, or a big bill.
    – HopelessN00b
    Nov 27, 2012 at 19:58

1 Answer 1

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  1. Note what physical connector each disk is attached to on your controller card.

  2. Write down the array configuration (disk order, stripe size).

  3. Take raw disk images of all your disks.

  4. Try to put array back online, manually inputting disk order, stripe size and RAID level. (Mount as read-only if possible.)

    • This is where you're going to need the manual for your controller to see how or if this is possible.

  5. Failing 4, you can try try to force the array online.

    • Again, you're going to need the manual for your controller to see how or if this is possible.

  6. Take disks, array controller and information from 1 and 2 to a professional recovery service and pay thousands of dollars to have them try.

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