Need advice on data recovery options (17894471 and 17844609)

[fh_unit_2]

Original Title: Data lost, need advise on recovery options

Hello. We had a single disk failure on a ReadyNAS NV+. Drive 1 failed with excessive SMART errors. Unit booted OK on three disks, but when system was powered-up with a new/blank disk in slot-1, the system tried to boot and failed. Afterwards, the system would not boot on three disks. Sent email to Netgear tech support, but after waiting several days we got impatient and cloned the original bad disk-1 using Knoppix. Plugged the clone into slot-1 and the ReadyNAS did boot but immediately entered resync. After resync, raidar display showed the volume as yellow ball/dead. Spent several more days talking to Netgear tech support on the phone. They were able to telnet into the malfunctioning unit, and restore the volume to a healthy/redundant state. However, almost all recent data...we are estimating 80 to 120 GBytes...was missing. Currently waiting for a callback from the Netgear data recovery department.

My Question: Can this type of data loss (due to a resync malfunction...maybe multiple resync malfunctions) be recovered?

Other questions: Does anyone have any experience or advice on who to hire to perform the recovery? I'm trying to talk to the Netgear data recovery department because I don't know where else to go. Any advice? Recommendations? War stories?

Two case numbers: 17894471 and 17844609. For some reason, the email conversations and telephone conversations have been assigned separate case numbers.

[readysecure1985]

Thank you for posting your case numbers. Will you edit the title to include the case numbers as well please?
I will urge you to work with support in this case to attempt the data recovery.

[fh_unit_2]

One of these cases went to level 3. In the judgment of level-3 the lost files and directories are/were too fragmented to recover. I'm guessing that some number of damaged or deleted directories were identified, else level-3 would have informed me that no data was lost. (As opposed to telling me that the lost data was beyond recovery.)

I was not able to ask more questions, as Level-3 left this info on my voice mail and then closed the case before I could respond.

So, I will repeat one of my prior questions to the audience:

Does anyone out there know of a 3rd party data recovery service that can recover information lost during a ReadyNAS NV+ sync malfunction? We did a google search, but nothing appealing was found.

[readysecure1985]

Have you looked at Drive Savers? http://www.drivesaversdatarecovery.com/ ... d-nas-san/
This is a company that I have used in the past, and they are good at what they do.