Access RAID hard disk drive externally on Windows 7 or 8

Question

We are using Iomega StorCenter ix2 for making our backup. Unfortunately last week it stopped responding and accessing. Earlier I was able to ping the device and only able open it through browser, but could not access the data by browser or by even file explorer. But yesterday ping and opening through browser also stopped. I have a huge data stored on that hard disk which i need to access.

I have attached the hard disk drive externally to my Windows 8 pc. In disk management, it shown up but only option available was delete volume, rest of the options were disabled. The size is 100% free. It’s a normal desktop PC which does not have any raid configured.

Please guide me how to access the data of RAID hard disk attaching externally to Windows 7 or 8.

Answer 1

I have used this same unit and have had drive crashes before. Did you have the unit configured as RAID 0 or RAID 1?

If RAID 0, then the data would be distributed between the two disks in such a way that both are required to retrieve the data.

If RAID 1, then each disk would store a copy of the data.

If you had two disks installed, and only one failed, and you were using RAID 1, you can simply install a second disk and the unit will rebuild the array automatically. I’ve done this before and it works fine without losing data.

You may want to discuss the issue with a professional data recovery company before going further, as you could damage the data beyond repair by attempting to fix it.

However, if you were on RAID 0 and one disk died, your data is probably lost, unless you want to try to dump an image of the drive to another working drive and re-add it back to the system to see if it can reconstruct part of the data.

If the unit only contained one disk installed, I have had excellent results using R-Studio to recover from various types of drives. It supports several Linux and Windows filesystems.

Good luck! I sincerely hope you kept good backups

NOTE: before doing this, exhaust your other recovery options, as this may completely corrupt the array!