Over the last two months, numerous persons contacted me about recovery of their files stored on a RAID-array. Their arrays were broken however, for example because the controller did not detect them as being part of a RAID-array, or not all disks are part of the array.

In such cases, you generally have two options:

1. Delete the array if applicable, and re-create the array using the exact same parameters: disk order and stripesize. If you do this wrong this may lead to dataloss. And the possibility exists that your RAID controller will delete the first 20MB or so after creating an array.

2. Much safer option: use Software RAID technology offered by Linux and FreeBSD to recover your files. Both can read NTFS just fine and can be instructed not to write to the disks under any circumstance.


How i can be of help
As i have some experience in this, i offer anyone my services to recover your data. The conditions are:

you need to download FreeBSD 7 (latest version) and install it on a seperate system drive, not part of the RAID array you want to recover.
you need to open access to the computer by creating a port-forward to the FreeBSD computer (TCP, port 22 ssh).
you will need to provide root access to the machine.

If you want me to try recovering your data, please provide all relevant information in an email to info at fluffles dot net. If you require help installing or configuring the system before ssh login works, please contact via IRC at irc.freenode.org channel #freenas. You can use the Chatzilla Firefox-extention as quick IRC client.

In most cases, recovery is succesful. Except in those where the partition table or filesystem data is corrupt. If there is no corruption then there should be no problem with recovering your files. After i've configured the system, you can transfer the files to another computer over the network. The procedure does not require me to see any filenames or other personal information. My service is free of any charge.