RAID 5 RECONSTRUCT with RAID Reconstructor

I have Dell Poweredge server 2600 with Raid 5 in 3 hard drive Scsi 36gb each, it was fail to boot sinc the third drive is offline.

I attached Sata card adapter to Sata hard drive and install OS SERVER 2003 to it, downloaded drivers for Raid and everything goes fine when I use recovery data software called "GetDataBack" from here http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm but the problem that not all data recovered, I am still looking for importants data with about 5 GB size.

I have another software called "RAID Reconstructor" from "http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm" I thought if I run it to reconstruct that will help to recover more data and put the third drive to be Online but I am afraid that might erase the current data in the other drives.

Please I need your advise in how I could retrive the remaining data? Thanks

1. For such issues you're best-off calling Dell support, even if the server is very old and definitely out of warranty and EoL, they might still help you through a RAID rebuild - I know I have.
2. Generally speaking, losing a single drive in a raid5 shouldn't bring your system down, if it has - you're in trouble with more than a single drive loss
3. What you have done might have ruined your raid array completely, but there might still be hope, the procedure you need to do is called re-tagging.

Here are the steps to re-tag a failed raid5:

1. Determine which drive failed first. This can be found by reading the controller logs
2. Remove all drives from the server, make sure you remember which drive was in which slot, it is important
3. Start the server up, enter the controller bios
4. write down all the configuration parameters of the failed raid5 - stripe size, caching setup etc
5. Clear all logical disks, so that the controller has no configuration at all
6. Power server down, insert all disks as they were
7. Power server up, enter controller bios again
8. Create a new raid array, exactly the same as the old one was, all parameters and disk addition order
9. The disk that was the first to fail should be marked as offline
10. This should bring you to a state where you have a usable raid5 in a degraded state.

If re-tagging fails, you're better off taking the disk set to a lab.

If it succeeds, you should boot the system, back it up, and then update the controller and hdd firmware. it is possible that the faulty drive is OK, and it went offline because of a firmware bug, and an update might fix it.

After the update, insert the faulty drive and try to rebuild, if rebuild fails - replace the drive.

You can also run a DST test on the drive to make sure it is usable