Oxyi,
This problem often occurs due to disk layout of the volumes, file system structures, and the behavior of the operating system at the time the recovery point image was made.
Though verification is turned on during the imaging process, the verification process only validates that what was backup was indeed what was seen during the snapshot phase of a drive at that specific time. If there was drive corruption, not severe enough to prevent us from backing up the drive in the first place, BESR - being a sector base imaging product - will backup the drive even if file system corruption exist.
If the corruption is a disk descriptor needed to give our mounting driver the ability to read the disk layout stored within the image, such as what the utility Recovery point browser will do when opening a recovery point image, it will open the image but would show you a drive of empty contents as you have described. If you run a validation of the image again it will come back still valid since the data, at the sector level, matches the copied snapshot image per check sum per block of data at the time of its creation; it does not validate the file system integrity.
If you do not have recovery point images dating back before the file system corruption I would perform the following steps:
1. Check you windows system event logs to see if you have system events from the source ‘Disk’; investigate the event Id assigned to it.
2. Within your troubleshooting you ran a Check disk on the original RAID 5 array. And you got an error similar to: File system is RAW; CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives.
3. Drive shows up in Disk management, and a drive letter has been given to it, but prompts to be formatted
If so, and you still have the original disks, I suggest seeking out data recovery service or software; you might still be able to recover data from these volumes.
If you do not have the original drives still and though you got these errors, if this occurs near the end of a restore proceed in seeing if you can recover the data through a recovery service or software.
I have not seen, << has anyone else in the forums>> if a recovery service or software is capable of restoring files from a software mounted drives. If it was able to as soon the drive is dismounted, for what ever reason, the changes to the virtual drive, at least through BESR would be lost; changes made to a mounted recovery point image are not saved to its corresponding recovery point file.
-Dave