I'm in a really tight spot and could really use some honest advice. We have an HP ProLiant ML310e Gen8 v2 server that was left in a bad state by the previous developer who vanished without providing us with any admin access. This server has crucial business data that we desperately need, including an old Microsoft Access database and several important documents.
Without the admin password, I decided to remove the hard drive, connect it to my laptop via a USB SATA dock, and try to access the data. Unfortunately, because of the HP B120i RAID controller, the drive appeared empty or was difficult to work with. After a lot of effort with commands like mount, diskpart, and chkdsk, I reinstalled the hard drive into the server, which unfortunately led to Windows not booting at all.
Now, all I get is a "Non-System disk or disk error" message. I've been able to boot from USB using SystemRescue live Linux and can access the BIOS, but I can't access the original Windows installation or boot from other media. Inside SystemRescue, I've used TestDisk extensively, but it keeps saying, "Can't open filesystem. Filesystem seems damaged," and PhotoRec only retrieves a bunch of random file fragments, none of the actual documents we need.
I'm very concerned about this situation and I'm wondering if there's anything else I can try inside SystemRescue to either repair the Windows boot process or recover the essential data. Is it time to give up, or is there a viable path left to explore?
4 Answers
It sounds like you're in a tough spot! First off, it’s important not to make any write operations on the drive, as this can make recovery even harder. Given that you've got access to a USB boot with SystemRescue, you should create an image of the hard drive instead of working on the live drive directly. This way, you preserve the current state of the drive. You can use a command like `ddrescue` to copy the drive bit by bit to an external disk. Once you have that image, you can try running TestDisk on the image file rather than the actual drive, which might help bypass the issues with the HP RAID metadata. You might also want to consider professional data recovery software that can handle the HP RAID offsets. Keep your chin up; with the right tools, you may still recover the data!
It’s great that you’re trying your hardest here! Just remember that it’s never a bad idea to ask a more experienced colleague for advice, too. They might have insights or tools you haven't thought of.
Honestly, this is a bit rough. You really should have some familiarity with RAID and system recovery techniques if you're in IT, but hey, we all start somewhere! If you only took out one drive, it might be even more complicated. Did you check if there are other drives connected that might be part of the RAID setup? Sometimes they need to be used together to access the data.
I totally get how overwhelming it can be! But don’t be too hard on yourself. It can happen to anyone, just try to learn from it!
Just to clarify, when you swapped the drive, did you remove all the drives or just one? If the RAID configuration needs multiple drives, this might complicate things further. You might need to put it back in the exact same configuration.
Yeah, definitely don’t mess with the original drive anymore. An image is the way to go. I had a similar issue once and managed to recover my files using specialized software just like you mentioned!