John Tunstall-datarecoveryservices.com

Down Dell server with RAID 10 , 6x 600gb SAS drives , last two mirrored drives are 1 failed and then other Foreign. First, enter SAS controller and write down current config, label all drives location. Then imaged all bad drives; bad drive imaged 3% foreign 99% . Next. Imaged all good drives. Attempted second image of Seagate 600 GB SAS labelled Bad , finished with 90 %. Restore images of Bad drive and Foreign drive to New replacements . Return all drives in server, delete config. Recreate Raid config you wrote down BUT DO NOT INITIALIZE. restart . Data should be accessible...with maybe a little more work ; )

3 copies of everything, you will never need me.

when working with a physically defective disk, time is against you when recovering data that could be destroyed while attempting to read the sectors the data occupies, or have your reading head sit in a scratched area, damaging the read/write heads further and /or sending debris across the platters. if the drive is failing, but not failed. I use several tools to copy raw sectors.... I first copy the first sector of the disk for partition info, this will tell you the size and location of the partition, saving you time when raw copying sectors. Next, I would attempt forward copying of the disk to an equal or greater sized disk, if I encounter bad sectors or noise, i would stop the task , note the sector successfully copied, and then start the duplication process at a sector past the known bad sector (as if jumping a pothole, or simply a circular scratch on a disk) so for instance a 500GB disk has 976,000,000 sectors , lets say the bad area from impact is between 10,000,000 and 20,000,000, so you can successfully copy from 0-10,000,000 , Stop and Skip 10,000,000 sectors to sector 20,000,000 and then copy between 20,000,000 and 976,000,000 successfully, this gives you a majority of the data area, it does not guarantee data needed, and of course now you can attempt to recover the bad sectors, jeopardizing the heads, forwards and backward, getting as much of the missing 5GB of area you can. Tips , if your drive is detected, copy it immediately, as you may not have the chance again. f you encounter a disk error, cycle the Power , it can help sometimes

Mobile forensics is growing and there are many applications for cellular acquisition, but LANTERN from https://katanaforensics.com/ makes a detailed/concise/easy to read PDF...messages are in order with all metadata intact.

hands down this http://www.r-studio.com data recovery software is the best and most robust recovery tool out there. I rely on many tools for Data recovery including my eyes , for any visual clues to failure(burns, dents) and my nose for burning smells but r-studio has duplicating tools, smart reading ability and identifies, parses a majority of OS's.