A company’s Huawei FusionServer running RAID 0 was hit by malware that wrecked its partition structures and RAID metadata — and with RAID 0’s zero redundancy, the whole striped volume went down. We isolated and imaged the disks, rebuilt the array from the copies, and recovered the files the malware had damaged or couldn’t reach. Where files were genuinely encrypted, we’re straight about the limits — and we never pay ransoms.
A corporate client’s Huawei FusionServer, configured as RAID 0, was struck by a malware infection. Afterwards the array wouldn’t come up: files and partitions were corrupt or missing, the system crashed and failed to boot, and business-critical documents and databases were inaccessible. Because RAID 0 stripes data across its disks with no redundancy at all, even limited corruption can take down the entire volume — and this was not limited. They stopped using the server and sent us the disks, which is the right response both to a RAID failure and to a suspected malware attack, where continuing to run the machine risks spreading the infection or overwriting recoverable data.
Two things stacked up here. First, RAID 0 has no safety net: it splits data across all the disks for speed, keeping no mirror and no parity, so there is nothing to fall back on when part of the volume is damaged — corruption anywhere can compromise the whole array. Second, malware doesn’t attack a single file politely; this infection had rewritten parts of the file system, damaged the partition structures, and corrupted the RAID metadata — the configuration that describes how the stripe fits together. With the metadata gone the server could no longer assemble its own array, and with the file system rewritten it couldn’t make sense of what it did read. The data itself, though, was still largely present on the disks; what had been destroyed was the structure that organised it.
With any malware case the first priority is containment. The disks were removed and imaged in an isolated environment through forensic write blockers, so the infected system was never booted again, the malware had no opportunity to run or spread, and the compromised drives could never be altered further. Every disk was cloned sector by sector, and all subsequent analysis — array reconstruction, damage assessment, extraction — happened on those images in a controlled setting, well away from any live network. That isolation protects both the recoverable data and everything else it might otherwise touch.
Because the RAID metadata was corrupt, the array was reconstructed manually from the images: analysing the striping patterns across the disks to determine the original RAID 0 layout — the stripe size and disk order — and reassembling the volume read-only, bypassing the damaged partition tables. With the stripe rebuilt, the malware’s damage could be mapped properly: which files had been structurally corrupted (and could be repaired), which were intact and simply orphaned by the wrecked file system (and could be relinked), and which had been genuinely lost. The bulk of the corporate documents, financial reports, client databases and operational records fell into the first two groups and were recovered.
It matters to be clear about what recovery can and cannot do when malware is involved. Where damage is structural — corrupted partitions, a rewritten file system, orphaned files — a great deal is recoverable by rebuilding those structures, which is what carried this job. But where ransomware has genuinely encrypted files with strong cryptography, those files cannot be decrypted without the attacker’s key, and no legitimate lab can ‘crack’ that — anyone claiming otherwise should be treated with caution. What a recovery can do in a ransomware case is salvage anything left unencrypted, recover earlier versions from shadow copies or remnants where they survive, and rebuild the array to reach whatever the attack didn’t complete. We do not pay ransoms, and we don’t promise to undo encryption we cannot undo.
The recoverable files were extracted from the reconstructed array, checked for integrity, and — importantly in a malware case — screened so that infected or corrupted items weren’t handed back, leaving a clean set. The result was a 95% recovery of the company’s business-critical data, returned on fresh, clean storage ready to be restored to a rebuilt and secured server. The lesson we passed on carries real weight here: RAID 0 offers speed and no protection whatsoever, and malware ignores redundancy anyway by attacking the data directly — so the only dependable defence is a proper backup kept offline or off-site, out of reach of an infection that can otherwise encrypt or corrupt everything it can touch, including connected backups.
Isolated, write-blocked imaging of every disk · manual RAID 0 reconstruction (stripe size, disk order) · partition and file-system repair · damage mapping and relinking of orphaned files · malware screening of recovered data · shadow-copy/remnant recovery where available. All work in-house at our Belfast lab.
Stop using it and disconnect it — running an infected server risks spreading the malware and overwriting recoverable data. Send us the disks for a free, no-obligation diagnostic; we’ll assess honestly what can and can’t be recovered and put a fixed price in writing before any work starts. We never pay ransoms. We handle priority RAID and server recoveries for businesses across the UK.
Often a lot of it, yes — but it depends on the damage. Where malware has corrupted the file system, partitions or RAID structure, rebuilding those recovers much of the data. Where files have been genuinely encrypted with strong ransomware, those specific files can’t be decrypted without the key. We recover what’s recoverable — unencrypted data, shadow copies and remnants — and we’re honest up front about what isn’t.
No legitimate lab can break strong ransomware encryption — be very wary of anyone who claims to. We don’t pay ransoms and don’t advise it: payment funds the attackers and often doesn’t restore the data. The realistic route is recovering everything the attack didn’t encrypt, plus any earlier versions that survive, and rebuilding from a clean backup.
RAID 0 stripes data across its disks with no redundancy, so there’s nothing to fall back on when part of the volume is damaged — corruption anywhere can bring the whole array down. Combined with malware that attacks the data and structure directly, that’s a serious loss, which is exactly why a RAID 0 server needs a separate, offline backup.
RAID recovery · Ransomware recovery · Virus & malware recovery