Greeting ive seen several post regarding RAID failure. My question is this:
Can ANY data be recovered from a RAID 1 (2 scsi physcial drives) once the new array has been inialized. My gut tells me no,

"if you inited the array ALL information is GONE. No if ands or buts. Normally there is a warning to this effect if you choose initalize. " - takin from a RAID FAILURE post earlier.

I need app's worth of data, not looking to recover the active dir, or other apps.
2 gigs worth.

Clearly you are talking hardware raid. You had a mirror set right? What failed? A drive or the controller?

I guess it doesn't matter if you initialized the drives.

Data is gone. Init writes 0's to the drive.

Where's your backup?

Affirmative, Hardware Raid , Controller failed...I believe Controller failed because an associate confused rear RAID scsi port on the Dell Poweredge 1500sc for a standered scsi controller and connected a 3rd party external tape drive to it,.. then after the machine wouln't boot he inited the drive and monkey'ed around with the RAID array.
Called ABC recovery today and the underpaid secretary "slash" recovery tech claims they can recover inited data off 2 scsi HDD's for 100 $ an hour ....are they full of it or has anyone ever heard of this being done before.?

backup?

"an associate confused rear RAID scsi port on the Dell Poweredge 1500sc for a standered scsi controller and connected a 3rd party external tape drive to it,.. "

He was installing the 3rd party tape drive so they could perform backups....too bad a years worth of police data didn't get back up'd (someone will deffinately lose thier job over this)

He claims he didn't Initialize drive (but its clearly empty) !!!

Is there any scenario in which the drive lost everything without Init being executed?
anything scenario short of the CIA and Little Green Men from Mars? Anything to save his job?
btw the physical mirrored drives appear to be intack, no errors, working ok , booted from CD... nothing on em.

Only an init would have wiped BOTH drives. That bites.

It is possible to recover data after an init. Govmt level can recover data after multiple wipes. But its not easy or cheap. Fortunately these are mirrored drives. So they have two medias in which to recover data.

$100 an hour is pretty reasonable. Especially if they can get a years worth of data back.

Best of luck!