A RAID 5 array that's dropped a disk, failed a rebuild or lost its controller can look catastrophic — but the data is usually recoverable. We image every member drive and rebuild the array virtually, with no risky writes to your original disks.
Free diagnostic on every RAID job. One fixed quote in writing before any work — RAID recovery from £500 + VAT, priced per disk, no fix no fee on logical rebuilds.
RAID 5 survives a single lost disk — but only one. These are the failures that bring an array to the bench.
RAID 5 tolerates one lost disk, but rebuilding onto a replacement hammers the ageing survivors for hours. A second drive dropping mid-rebuild is the classic way a recoverable array becomes an emergency.
A dead RAID controller, HBA or backplane can take the whole array offline even though every disk is healthy. The configuration and parity metadata have to be read before the volume can be rebuilt.
When a disk drops out and the array runs degraded, that member goes stale. Forcing it back online later mixes old and new data and corrupts the parity across the set.
Unnoticed bad sectors on more than one member mean parity can't cover every stripe. We image around the damage before any rebuild is attempted.
Re-creating the array, initialising it, or a well-meaning 'repair' from the dashboard can overwrite the metadata that describes exactly how your data is laid out.
Capacity expansions and RAID-level migrations that stall part-way leave the array in an inconsistent state that simply won't mount.
We never work on your original disks. Every member drive is cloned to a stable image with hardware imagers, and any physically failing disk is repaired in the clean-air lab first. From those images we determine the exact disk order, block size, rotation and parity direction, rebuild the array virtually, and extract your files — leaving your original disks untouched as a fallback.
The instinct after a RAID 5 failure is to slot in a new disk and let the controller rebuild. On an array that has already lost its redundancy, that rebuild puts maximum stress on the remaining drives at exactly the moment they can least take it — and a second failure part-way through turns a straightforward recovery into a far harder one. If a rebuild has already failed, power the system down and don't retry it.
Most RAID 5 sets we recover are the primary storage in a small-business server or NAS. We handle Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, Lenovo and custom-built servers, and NAS boxes from Synology, QNAP and Netgear, for businesses across Surrey and west London. Media is posted or couriered to our Guildford location, and urgent business cases can be prioritised — see our general RAID recovery service, NAS recovery, and typical data recovery costs.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee on logical rebuilds — start now or call the freephone.
Most customers post or courier their media to us.
Sending a drive from a computer, laptop, MacBook, iMac, CCTV / DVR or server? Please remove the internal hard drive or SSD and send us just the drive — we don't provide an internal drive-removal service. We don't recover storage soldered to a motherboard (e.g. Apple Silicon Macs and some thin laptops) — only drives that can be removed and sent to us.
↓ Print the booking-in & shipping form (PDF)
Mark the package for the attention of Guildford Data Recovery and we'll call you as soon as we diagnose your media.
Not sure what to send? Call 0800 689 0668 first or use the free online diagnostic.