We have a windows server 2008 r2 installed dedicated server. Our provider moved our server to their new data center location recently. After this process, we cannot able to open our server.
They said "disk is failed". Disk was not showing in bios nor windows. They install new clean install on different hdd and connect failed drive as second hdd.
When i opened disk management, i see disk 1 but i cant do anything on it.
Is there any software level recovery option we can apply? If there isn't any, how we can restore our data in any way.
Thanks in advance.
Best Answer
You should not have too high hopes in data recovery. With most data loss cases, not all of the data can be recovered. Especially so if you are limited in your actions. A number of good and well-documented open source data recovery tools exist with Linux live DVDs, a number of commercial solutions are available for Windows.
If the disk's hardware is really defective and data cannot be either read or written at all using the SAS or SATA commands, software will not help you any further.
In this case, you would need to employ a data recovery service which has the capacities to open up the disk, remove the platters and read the data out in a different set of mechanics / electronics. Note that while many of them are offering a "free" or low-cost initial analysis, the recovery itself can be quite costly - you should be calculating $ 3,000 upwards, depending on the failure mode and the amount of data to be recovered.
If you are interested in the mechanics and want to try yourself (note though that you can irreversibly damage data if it goes wrong), take a look at this presentation from Scott Moulton: