Case studies
R3's case studies are real jobs from its lab, written up from the engineers' own notes. Each one explains what the first symptom suggested, what examination found and what the lab did.
Dell PowerEdge RAID 5 recovery: one drive left out
A three-drive RAID 5 array from a Dell PowerEdge T110 II server was reconstructed from sector-by-sector copies of its disks. One drive had dropped off the array a long time ago, and leaving it out gave a full file tree without errors.
QNAP RAID 5 recovery after a power outage: healthy drives, lost structure
A QNAP TS-410 came in with all four drives showing as unmounted after a power outage. The drives copied with no bad sectors, but the disk order had changed and the metadata was gone. The engineers recovered 1.47TB of data, with subfolders intact and the root folder names lost.
Clicking drive in a factory PC: a firmware fault, not the heads
A clicking WD 160GB drive from an old factory PC turned out to have a firmware fault, not failed heads. After the firmware repair, a long sector-by-sector pass produced a bootable copy that ran the original system again.
Shorter examples from the lab appear on symptom pages, such as Clicking Hard Drive Recovery, RAID 5 Data Recovery.
Contact R3 Data Recovery
To discuss a data loss incident, contact our team by telephone or submit an enquiry online. An engineer will review your situation and advise on next steps.