Hi all,

I mounted a wrong hdd (of a windows 7 laptop) into a Synology NAS and ran a Synology installation. I didn't select "Create a Synology Hybrid RAID volume" option. The installation process finished (took about 15 minutes) and gave me the following report:
1. Applying network settings (ok)
2. Formatting system partition (ok)
3. (Greyed out) Formatting data partition
4. Installing DSM (ok)

I was told on a Synology forum that the hdd had been formatted (data lost, hdd converted from NTFS to EXT4) and that I could try to recover as much as data as possible but there was no concensus on the best way of doing so. What would be the best approach?
1/ Take image of hdd and work on this copy
2/ Would it be possible to recover the partitions? (with eg Testdisc)
3/ Recover the files with eg Photorec?
4/ Would it be imaginable to recuperate the windows recovery files?
...

Thanks for your feedback!

Try Partition Find and Mount:
http://findandmount.com/

You could also examine the drive with a disc editor such as DMDE (freeware):
http://dmde.com/

Hopefully your original data partition is beyond the area that was overwritten by the Synology installation.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

You can try to scan the drive with r-studio and see if it can find your files, even if you have to carve for them.
For the instalation to take that long, 15 min, i would say that something was written to the drive overwritting at least partialy the previous content of the drive, making it un-recoverable.
If you find the files save them to ANOTHER DRIVE and not to the drive you are trying to recover from.

_________________
1Q9xrDTzTddUXeJAFRn37aqh1Yr6buDCdw - (Bitcoin Donations)
paypal.me/Spildit - (PayPal Donations)
The HDD Oracle - Platform for OPEN research on Data Recovery.

agree to try Find and Mount.

With DMDE or Find and Mount, create a disk image, and then use r-studio or GetDataBack to recover any files from that image.. IMHO a GDB license is well worth the money and comes in handy often.

It is a good idea to create an image then put the disk somewhere safe if your only option is to send to a pro. The cost is usually less, and recovery chances better if the disk has had minimal interactions after the event.

If you have the money it is even better idea to send straight to a DR Pro, though with no expected physical damage, if the files are there you should be able to recover them with software.

Ext FS overwrites the file system considerably.
I'd say you can rescue about 80% of your data if group allocation table (one of its copies) did not overwrite the MFT.

Select NTFS (disregard any software suggestions, make it "forced") and perform the scan.
UFS Explorer should do the job: http://www.ufsexplorer.com/

Be sure to save the found data onto a separate drive.

_________________
• Remote RAID, NAS, SAN, VMware, DVR (CCTV), flash and tape recovery. Data recovery support.

You are going to need someone that can help with a manual rebiuld of front end of ntfs partition. You may be lucky with dr software and get what you need.

_________________
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you probably don't fully understand the situation. ... Mr Kipling

https://www.mjm.co.uk/