This is my first post, I hope someone can shed some light on the current situation.
I have a Dell PowerEdge 2800 with a Raid 5 configuration with 3 x 286 GB Hard Drives. I initially was going to use this as a desktop so I installed Vista and created a 80GB parition (C:\)for the OS, then through the OS I formatted the second partition (D:\). I saved a about 40 GB of important data to (D:\). When I found out about video card limitations on this system, I decided to install SBS 2003 premium. I started the instsall for SBS and selected the (C:\) and also selected to replace the current OS (Vista) and format the the drive with NTFS (Quick). After loading all the setup files it did it’s first reboot. Upon the first reboot the system no longer recognized the raid array. Since the server is still in warranty, I called dell. (Possibly a huge mistake). Dell had me try everything under the sun, which may have made things worse. They had me force offline disc 2 of array (0,1,2), and then clear vram on board, then clear raid config…none of this worked or helped. Then Dell had me pull out disk 1 and 2 and install and OS on disk 0 to see if OS would pick up other drives. Non of this helped. They bascically couldn’t do anymore after 5 hours and suggested that I contact http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com, which wants a $2,000 initial fee and said that it would costs between 15-25K to recover the data. Does anyone have any idea how to recover the data from a corrupt Raid 5 array other than spending 30K? PLEASE HELP!
