Recovery of a Failed RAID 5 Server Array

The Problem (Before)

A commercial enterprise faced a sudden outage of their primary file and accounting database server, running a RAID 5 array configured with four 4TB hard drives. The incident began when one drive failed (which RAID 5 can tolerate). However, before their internal IT team could replace the degraded drive, a sudden power outage caused severe mechanical damage to two additional drives.

The server went permanently offline. All financial databases and shared company documents became inaccessible, completely paralyzing the company’s operations and sales. The local IT team attempted to force a rebuild several times, which only corrupted the parity logic further and compounded the crisis.

The Solution (After)

Datacodex received the server’s drives under extreme emergency priority.

Our recovery protocol unrolled as follows:

1. We immediately halted all rebuild attempts to prevent permanent overwriting of the original data.
2. We evaluated all four drives individually, successfully identifying the exact mechanical failures on the two recently crashed drives.
3. The damaged drives were temporarily repaired inside our certified Cleanroom, allowing us to safely extract sector-by-sector clones of all array members.
4. Using proprietary software tools, our engineers manually analyzed the hexadecimal data structures to recalculate the original RAID parameters (Block Size, Parity Order, and Stripe Offset) that were scrambled during the failed rebuild attempts.
5. We successfully built a virtual array from the clones and extracted the critical SQL databases and file shares.

Final Result: We fully recovered 100% of the vital databases and over 98% of the general staff documents. These were provisioned onto a new backup server and securely delivered to the client. The enterprise resumed normal operational capacity just 48 hours after they entrusted their hardware to us.