RAID technology overview: Proper and Improper Rebuild for RAID-5

Posted on 01/16/2025 by ACELab team


Improper rebuild is a mistake customers often make when trying to solve array problems on their own. This issue is complex enough to confuse a data recovery engineer. It is important to understand exactly what is happening to the data and how it affects the chances of a successful data recovery.

We will look at the most popular level — RAID-5. We will consider how the processes of initialization, correct and incorrect rebuild are performed for it. Furthermore, we will discuss whether it is possible to recover data after an incorrect rebuild.

There can be many variants of incorrect rebuild for RAID-5, in this article we will limit ourselves to just one of them — when the new and old configurations are the same. This is the common case in practice and the easiest to explain and recover data from. Once we have studied it, we can move on to more complex cases in the following articles.

We assume that you have studied the previous article on RAID-1 and understand what we mean by initialization, rebuild, and the nature of the “improper rebuild” problem. So let’s go straight to the specifics of these processes for RAID-5.

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PC-3000 Flash – Noname (CBM2099) USB Recovery. Importance of Translator assembling

Posted on 12/04/2024 by ACELab team

Hello guys!

Sometimes, Data Recovery Lab may get a USB Flash drive with a no name controller inside in the COB (chip-on-board) package. Usually such controllers are extremely cheap, and you can find them inside “10 bucks” drives from Amazon / Alibaba or inside souvenir USB Flash sticks.

Anyway, people don’t care about the internal component quality: a Flash stick is a Flash stick that needs to be used! And if we have it, why don’t we put the most important and regularly used data on it?! Without a backup of course!

Here is the story of a tiny drive brought in by a friend of our TS engineer.

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PC-3000 Data Extractor. An easy way to make a task on a network drive

Posted on 11/19/2024 by ACELab team


Hello Friends! Modern drives become bigger and bigger every day, and we must use large drives in our PC for current tasks to save customers data on them. A lot of us have more than one computer with PC-3000 in our Labs. Purchasing a large number of hard drives for multiple computers becomes quite expensive, and local free space goes away too fast. What if we had the ability to save tasks from all computers to network drives and work with them in Data Extractor like as they are on local drives? Let’s discuss it in this article.

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RAID technology overview: Proper and Improper Rebuild for RAID-1 (Mirror)

Posted on 10/28/2024 by ACELab team


Most RAID levels use redundancy to ensure the reliability of the array. Redundancy allows the array to continue operating without data loss if one of the drives fails. This technology was designed to save data, but if used improperly, it can lead to data loss.

In this article, we will look at the problem of an “improper rebuild”, which can make RAID data recovery very difficult or even impossible. This is a common mistake made by RAID storage users who try to restore the functionality of the array on their own. Only after failing to recover, they turn to a data recovery service. We will take a closer look at why people make this mistake.

As an example, we will use one of the easiest levels to understand — RAID-1 (Mirror). In such arrays, a complete copy of data is stored on all members (most often there are two). If one drive fails, all the data is on the other one.

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Work with AFH in Seagate F3 Utility

Posted on 09/09/2024 by ACELab team

Implementation of the tool in the utility was delayed for a long time because work with the heating parameters of the read-write head required extreme caution. An incorrect choice of tactics for work with a damaged drive will lead to a scratch – irreversible damage to the surface of the disks containing user data. Before moving on to work with the AFH wizard, we will briefly describe the technology. Its essence explains, why inappropriate work with it poses fatal risk to the HDD.

AFH (Adaptive Fly Height) is the system adjusting the flight altitude of the magnetic head slider section containing the writing and reading elements. For clarification, we shall refer to the following illustration from patent sources describing the technology.

 

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Posted in Data Extractor, PC-3000 HDD | 3 Comments

PC-3000 SSD Systems. The List of Supported SSDs (regularly updated, ver. 3.5.3)

Posted on 08/19/2024 by ACELab team

Hello friends!

The ACE Lab developers constantly research drives, which results in a rapid expansion of the Support List for most of the modern SSDs. So with the PC-3000 Systems that support Solid State Drives, you will always be on the cutting edge of
data recovery technology!

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Western Digital SMR. Formatted Drive Solution.

Posted on 03/06/2024 by ACELab team


Modern SMR drives are very sensitive due to a new shingled recording technology. The writing density becomes higher, and also, the internal processes in the drive firmware almost never stop. Even when the drive is idle, bands are rewritten to optimize data access. This is very good for data reading speed and increasing the amount of data written to the drive, but, unfortunately, sometimes this can be a reason of the internal processes fail, and the drive stops giving previously written data. Windows sees that the User Area is not allocated and automatically starts the format procedure. Yes, the drive is detected and works after that, but all the data on it disappears. The problem is that when formatting, the second-level translator also changes. What can be done in such a situation? Let’s look at it in this article.

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PC-3000 Flash. The Importance of having a powerful PC (UPDATED FEB 2024)

Posted on 02/23/2024 by ACELab team

Hello Friends!

As you may already know Flash recovery requires many more hardware resources than data recovery with PC-3000 Express, PC-3000 UDMA or PC-3000 Portable III Systems. When you have to deal with HDDs, all complex operations are produced by the internal CPU on the drive’s PCB. But if you work with Flash devices, all the operations such as ECC correction, XOR decryption, page, and block splitting are applied within the PC-3000 Flash software.

Today we’re going to run some tests and show you the difference between various PCs configurations. In the end, the importance of having a good and stable PC configuration will become obvious. Also, do not hesitate to read our regularly updated article “The Best PC Configuration for the PC-3000 tools”.

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A brick named Rosewood

Posted on 01/19/2024 by ACELab team

Disclaimer: the article is specially written in an easy form to simplify the perception of the information presented; despite this, the material should be taken as seriously as possible.

Currently, we receive a lot of modern SMR drives for data recovery, which output a huge number of messages to the terminal at startup, and eventually freeze without access via ATA or terminal. In this case, messages can end either with the output LED BD FAdr xxxx, or without this assertion. When resuscitating SMR drives with Media Cache, you should keep in mind that it accumulates updates with the latest write operations to the disk. The main risk area includes file system metadata – small portions of updates, for example, MFT records. In our practice, there were cases when a very significant part of the MFT was stored in the MC. At the same time, when reading without MC, sectors filled with zeros were read. Or an irrelevant “past life”. Therefore, any actions to gain access to SA must be calculated so that key data elements are not damaged during manipulation and restart of the drive. We will give examples of actions with frozen drives and their dangerous moments below.

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PC-3000 SSD. How to choose the correct loader for SM2258XT/SM2259XT/XT2

Posted on 10/13/2023 by ACELab team

Hello everyone!

ACE Lab Technical Support department gets a lot of requests from your side about modern Solid State Drives based on such popular SMI controllers as SM2258XT, SM2259XT, SM2259XT2. All these controllers are fully supported in PC-3000 UDMA, Express and Portable III starting from 2020-2021, and now if you got one of these controllers in your target drive, we can try to guide you how to recover it.

Anyway, a huge number of requests from customer side makes us to write this article which could be a handy instruction – how to properly work with these drives and how we can initialize the correct loader.

Before we start, a short guide about the LOADER – what is that, and who is guilty?!

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