LTT Linus did a video on drive recovery a while back. IIRC that company was in NYC. ATM your buddy has nothing to loose anymore (he already lost the data!), so maybe he should find the nearest shop in town and give it a try.
Best bet is they contact the system vendor, since the raid code is likely proprietary to the controller. HPE and Dell both offer pay per incident service. This will end up costing thousands. Business insurance will likely help out assuming the business is insured and the deductible is not ridiculous.
There was another tool, that is not in this list, which I used before, called “RAID Reconstruction Tool”, but I cannot find it, maybe the company closed, or merged, or renamed.
These are the top right now:
However, if the problem is mechanical and there are more than 1 disks failed, he won’t recover much, mostly small files that are on a single disk
Checking it out! Yea asked my buddy who is maintaining things… he is… Guess he thought backups are useless… working with him on getting backups setup with remote site,etc.
I’m a java dev, usually I just break things and admin saves my butt.
I would not try any DIY software tools to recover data. If the data is valuable send it to a professional forensic recovery center. If the data isn’t that valuable, then well… start over with new gear and proper backup solution(s).
No, different video. He did one where he actually lost data on his own server (the despair on his face wasn’t acted!) and he went to NYC to see Louis Rossmann, as alluded to before in this thread.