A degraded array limps on until a second drive fails, a rebuild goes wrong, or the controller dies and takes the configuration with it. We recover RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 arrays from servers, workstations and NAS units across Surrey and west London — including urgent RAID server recovery for businesses.
Free diagnostic on every raid array job. One fixed quote in writing before any work begins.
No fix, no fee all jobs except electronic and mechanical failures, chip level work, DVR and Forensic jobs. Full pricing is on the data recovery cost page.
Every raid array job starts by matching the symptoms to the fault — these twelve cover almost everything that reaches the bench.
RAID's defining catastrophe: one loss is survivable by design, then the rebuild finishes off a second, older member.
A rebuild run onto a suspect drive stalls halfway and wrecks the very parity it was depending on.
The card takes the array definition to its grave — so the geometry is worked back out from the drives themselves.
Force an outdated member back into the set and the file system shreds itself against the stale data.
Creating a fresh array over the old one tramples the metadata — stop it before initialisation completes.
A power event can drop two or three members in one hit; each is repaired and imaged on its own before anything else.
When drives 'fail' in groups, suspect the chassis wiring before the disks — diagnose first, panic never.
The array itself is healthy but the NTFS/ext4/VMFS above it is wrecked — that's rebuilt at parser level.
A deleted definition can be brought back for as long as the blocks underneath it survive.
A flat controller battery plus sudden power loss splits parity from data — reconciled at image level.
A failed Dell PERC or HP Smart Array controller loses the array definition — the geometry is re-derived from the drives alone.
One member develops failed heads and starts clicking; it's repaired on the clean bench, then imaged like the rest of the set.
Before a single decision is made, every member drive is captured sector by sector — no original is ever worked on directly. Those images are then used to derive the array's geometry (order, block size, rotation, offset), stand the volume up virtually, and lift off the file system sitting on top. A RAID 5 carrying a stale member, a RAID 6 double failure, nested RAID 10 sets, hardware controllers that forgot their configuration — all of it is standard work for our lab.
Don't force drives back online, don't run a rebuild onto suspect disks, and don't let a generic IT fix-it try 'just one more thing' — partial rebuilds destroy the parity that recovery depends on. Shut the system down, mark each drive with its bay, and give us a ring. Business-critical array down? Say so when you call and we'll fast-track the diagnostic.
One rule governs every RAID job — nothing happens until everything is imaged — and the bench exists to enforce it:
Before anyone analyses anything, each member drive is copied at the same time on its own dedicated hardware — an original never goes back into a rebuild.
Runs against the copies to work out the array's geometry — which drive sat where, block size, rotation, offsets — then brings the array up virtually.
A failed member isn't abandoned: it gets the complete hard drive treatment — heads, firmware, electronics — until it can be imaged with the rest.
The solved geometry is proven with parity and entropy checks before the file system is lifted off the reassembled volume.
Whatever lived on top of the array — NTFS, ReFS, ext4, XFS, BTRFS, VMFS, even virtual machine disks — is read natively.
Member drives are only ever read, never written; they go home in the state they arrived.
Hardware, software or somewhere in between — the geometry always lives on the drives, and that's all we need. A failed Dell PERC or HP Smart Array controller loses the array definition, which we re-derive from the members themselves; and where a Seagate or WD member has failed heads or firmware, it's repaired on the clean bench and imaged before the array is rebuilt.
Shut the server or array down, pull the member drives and MARK each one with its slot or bay position — without the order, reconstruction gets much harder. Only the labelled drives need to travel; keep the controller and chassis where they are. A quick photo of the original layout is genuinely useful.
Most customers post their media to us tracked and insured.
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.
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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.
Free diagnostic, fixed quote, no fix no fee — start now or call the freephone.