Q: After upgrading to Windows 7, I can not longer see my drives in any of your software.

A: This is due to the UAC that Windows Vista and Windows 7 have in place. In order to bypass this, you can simply right click on the icon of the program you are running and selecting “Run as administrator”. You will then have access to the physical drives at this point.

You must do this even if you are the administrator of the computer. If you have any questions regarding this, feel free to contact us.

When recovering the data after Raid Reconstructor has finished and you have a virtual image, we give people two options; You can use GetDataBack for NTFS or you can use Captain Nemo.

If your controller card went out or you had a drive physically fail in a raid 5, then you can generally use Captain Nemo. Captain Nemo is a file system mounter. It’s only job is to mount the file system. If your file system is in good shape, then you will see your data and directory structures almost immediately and copy them at that point. If the file system is damaged, then Nemo will give you an error about the partition or file system and will not present you with any of your data.

This is where GetDataBack comes in. GetDataBack is a data recovery tool.

• If you need to recover deleted files, then you must use GetDataBack.
• If your file system is damaged, then you must use GetDataBack.
• If Captain Nemo give you any problems at all, then use GetDataBack to recover your data.
• If you see your data in Captain Nemo but can not see the files you are looking for, use GetDataBack.

Here is a breakdown of the differences between GetDataBack and Captain Nemo. You can easily see where and when you would want to use GetDataBack vs Captain Nemo.

We have now released Captain Nemo Pro version 4.0. This is not the Nemo you are used to. You can now mount a reconstructed RAID in seconds, saving many hours over scanning the image in GetDataBack. Captain Nemo can still mount Linux and Netware devices.

Lets take a quick walk through the process.

You will need to start with RAID Reconstructor.

Now you will need to start Captain Nemo Pro Version 4.0.

Open a few files in order to test them. The fact that you see the folders, files, file names, the right file size, etc. is a good sign but does not necessarily mean that the file content is there and those files will be usable. You will not be able to test huge files or files that need to be imported correctly into their native application, like for example, Outlook PST files.

Select files that are easy to check – for example Word documents, pictures, or mp3. Open these files by double clicking them or by using the built-in viewer(F3). Please note: To open files by double clicking them, their associated application needs to be installed on the recovery computer.

Do the files open fine. meaning you can see the file content, the text, picture?
If so repeat the same process with a couple of more files in different folders.
If all or at least the majority of files open okay, your recover is looking good.

You should purchase the software from our website and copy the data to a different drive.

Reconstructing a RAID is not a trivial task. There are many things that can cause the software to not produce the correct settings to ensure a properly constructed array. There are a few steps you will need to follow.

1. You will need to attach all the drives to a non-RAID controller so that the operating system can see all the drives as single drives inside of Windows.

2. You will need to start the software and choose your type of array at the top of the screen with the number of drives included in the array. If you have a RAID-0 with more than 2 drives or a RAID-5 with more than 11 drives, you will need to use our RaidProbe service. You can find more information about this service at http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm#raidprobe. If you have a 2 drive RAID-0, be sure to watch our tutorial about this type of recovery at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWNq5rAhZ9Y.

3. You will then need to enter all these drives into RAID Reconstructor by right clicking on the white space next to the drive number and selecting the drives that belong in the array. If your RAID is a RAID-5 with one drive missing, leave one field empty. Once this is done, open the drives by clicking the open button at the bottom of the drive list on the right hand side.

4. You will now need to analyze the drives in the step 2 box at the top right hand side of the software. When this finishes, you must look at the bottom of the analysis screen to see if you received a RECOMENDED ENTRY. If you received a RECOMMENDED ENTRY, then click finish and go to step 5 of this article. If it says RESULT NOT SIGNIFICANT, then the software did not properly put the array together because it does not have all the information needed. If you are unable to produce a RECOMMENDED ENTRY, do not make an image of this RAID because it will just produce non-working files. You should then consider letting us do a RaidProbe which will allow us to put the array together by hand. Once it is completed, we will send you all the parameters and detailed instructions on how to rebuild the array for you. You can find more information about the RaidProbe at http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm#raidprobe.

5. Once you have your settings, in step 3 of the software, you have the choice to make a virtual image, an image or write the data back to a drive directly. You would usually choose the virtual image. (If you are using a file system other than FAT or NTFS, there is no sense in making an image as we do not make data recovery software for file systems other than FAT and NTFS.) If you choose to write the data directly to a drive, this will only work if the reason for the RAID failure was a controller failure. Otherwise there is something wrong with the file system or partition table that has caused the array failure in the first place and you will need to run GetDataBack to recover the data at that point.

6. Once you created the virtual image or the image, there are two options to recover your data.

Option 1: Mount the image with Captain Nemo
You should use Captain Nemo if there is little or no file system damage. The advantage of Captain Nemo over GetDataBack is that Captain Nemo gives you immediate access to your files while GetDataBack will need to scan your image first. Download Captain Nemo (http://www.runtime.org/nemopro.zip) and mount the image you just created. You can now copy the files to another location.

Option 2: Scan the image with GetDataBack
If there is significant file system damage or Captain Nemo does not bring the results you expect, you will need to download GetDataBack for NTFS (http://www.runtime.org/gdbnt.zip) to process the image you just created. We have also created a tutorial on how to do this at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQBprGyy_Ko.

If you run into problems with any of these steps, let us know right away so we can help you.

Runtime Software is proud to announce that we are now offering our customers a RAID Probe. What does this mean for you?

More and more people are setting up raid arrays at home and not realizing the potential for the array to become corrupt or damaged just like an ordinary drive. When that array does down, you can use our RAID Reconstructor to recreate the array to recover the data. If you can not get the software to find your raid parameters because you used a proprietary controller or just do not understand what is happening in the software, you can now let us do the hard part for you.

Be sure you are using the newest version of RAID Reconstructor, click on Tools>Create RAID Probe.

Follow the directions and it will create a zip file once it is done. You can then send the zip file to a local FTP location or contact us for a place to send the file. We will then analyze this probe and attempt to find the parameters for you. Once we determine the parameters, we will send you a Virtual Image file that you load into GetDataBack in order to continue with your recovery. This is a manual service which we charge $299 for. You will only be charged if we find the parameters. Note: RAID Probe is currently only available for NTFS formatted systems.

The concept of Data Entropy is greatly used in RAID Reconstructor. Invented by Claude Shannon in 1948, it provides a way to measure the average number of bits needed to encode a string of symbols.

When looking through an unknown set of raw data on a drive, we calculate the number of bytes needed to encode the content of any given sector. Since a sector contains 512 bytes, this is a number between 0 and 512. If we divide this by 512 we are dealing with a number between 0 and 1. A sector containing only ‘a’s has an entropy near 0. A highly compressed JPEG has entropy near 1.

Have a look at popular compression utilities such as Winzip or Winrar. If these programs compress a file with 1,000,000 bytes to 1000 bytes the entropy is around 1000/1,000,000 which is 0.001. A 1,000,000 bytes file compressed to 900,000 bytes has entropy of 0.9. Shannon’s formula enables us to calculate the entropy without actually performing the compression.

But how does this help us to reconstruct broken RAID’s? Most files have consistent entropy that does not vary much between sectors. For example, the entropy of the English language averages 1.3 bit per character. This means you need 666 bits (=83 bytes) to encode a sentence with 512 characters (stored in one sector). Our entropy of this sector containing English text would be 83/512 which is 0.16. You can assume that sectors with similar entropies belong together. This is how RAID Reconstructor decides what the drive order and the block size are for drives that previously belonged to a RAID. It also explains why sometimes RAID Reconstructor’s analysis fails. If the probed areas on the drives contain a huge amount of all the same kind of data, there is nothing RAID Reconstructor can “see”.

Next week I will have a look at RAID Reconstructor’s Entropy Test.

Uwe

Now we will look at how to scan that image that was made using RAID Reconstructor in the previous post. An image is just a file copy of a physical drive. There is no difference in scanning a physical drive over scanning an image, they contain exactly the same data.

Start GetDataBack for NTFS and from the Welcome screen, choose what type of recovery you want to do and click next. You will now be presented with the available drives to scan for recovery. Under the physical drives and logical drives, you will see the option that says Image Files (load more…). You can click on Load More and you will be presented with a select file box. You can then browse to your image and select it to open that image as the drive to scan. Once you have done this, click next in the bottom right hand corner to scan the image in the exact same way as a physical drive.

Please watch the tutorial for more information and detail on how to do this exactly. If you have any questions, feel free to email us at support@runtime.org

Watch the tutorial

The first thing to know about RAID 0 is that it is not a replacement for a RAID 5. This seems to be the biggest misunderstanding about RAID 0’s. People have a drive physically die and then think, “Well next time I will build a RAID 0 and not have this happen ever again.”, then they call us asking why it failed.

RAID 0 arrays will suffer the same issues as a single drive, if the drive physically dies, the only thing you can do is send it to a hardware recovery company. You will have the same issues with creating a RAID 0 that has more then two drives, if one dies, then the entire array will go down. This would be like having an airplanes with six engines and if one of them fails, the plane crashes. If you have more than two drives, make a RAID 5.

This is where RAID Reconstructor comes in. If your array is broken because of controller issues or you do not have the orignal computer you created the array in, RAID Reconstructor can help you. It will allow you to take a two drive RAID 0 and de-stripe it into a single image or back to a drive. If you make the image, then you can scan that image in GetDataBack for NTFS. If you write the data back to a single drive, the file system and partition table of the array must be intact, otherwise you will end up with an empty drive that you will need to also run GetDataBack for NTFS on to recover the data.

If you run RAID Reconstructor with the default settings on a RAID 0, you will not get the recommended entry as most RAID 0 arrays do not start at sector zero. Watch our video tutorial to see exactly what must be done to get a recommended entry.

Watch the tutorial