Ace Data Recovery Retrieves Patient Data for 400 Hospitals

ACE Data Recovery (ACE Data Group, LLC.) designed custom software to retrieve patient data from a failed Promise VTrak RAID array after the RAID configuration was lost.

A managed, online, patient care electronic workflow provider, which holds patient information for more than 400 hospitals, called ACE Data Recovery after numerous unsuccessful attempts to bring the data back online.

The RAID’s configuration is usually stored either in the controller’s NVRAM or on the HDDs belonging to the array. In some instances, a power surge for example, this configuration can be lost. It is possible to restore the configuration to the RAID controller if the exact configuration at the point of failure is known.

“Our diagnostics showed that the Promise VTrak appliance was originally configured as RAID-10 and RAID-5 logical drives,” said Fedir Bandurin, ACE senior enterprise recovery engineer. “Both logical drives were spread over the entire RAID array. After the configuration was lost, customer made several attempts to initialize each logical drive as RAID-6. They used the original drives, previously active in the array, to attempt this. All attempts failed because of physical issues with one of the drives. Therefore, the process of overwriting the original configuration with RAID-6 was only partially completed.“

“After consulting with the customer, we repaired and extracted the raw data from the failed HDD with the media damage,” continued Bandurin. “Once this raw data was in hand, we developed a custom application to eliminate the derelict parity stripes of the RAID-6 initialization. The difference between this recovery and a typical RAID-5 recovery, when data can be retrieved with one missing drive, was that 4 clusters were overwritten in each stripe with RAID-6 parity data. We managed to recover all data in less than 48 hours allowing the client to get back to work without suffering any major service disruptions.”