Had a 4 bay usb drive server thing running as a JBOD fail completely, will not boot, can't get it to do anything. Of the 4 drives, 3 of them work fine in single usb hard drive enclosure and are accessible like normal. The other one doesn't look right at all and I can't access it's file system. In disk manager, the messed up drive reports the following: 16,384.00 GB Healthy (GPT Protected Partition) 100% Free Disk

I have a copy of Recuva. What are the steps I can take to maximize the chances of data recovery? I'm nervous to mess with it because I haven't seen anything like this before. The drive seems to spin up quickly and was only a month old. It's a 3tb Toshiba. The entire array was not anywhere close to 16tb, so I don't know where that number came from. My first impulse is to do a quick format to get it back to 3tb, but don't know if that would work.

Do not make any changes to the drive. If you value your data, you are best to seek professional data recovery assistance as you will likely not be able to recover your data without this drive. If your data isn't worth $1000 to $2000 USD and you are 100% sure you are willing to accept the risk of losing it all, we can then discuss your case further for DIY.

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Luke
Recovery Force Donor Inventory: 5,000+ Fully Cataloged HDDs & Growing

If you see 16Tb mapped space it is ok, coz , logically FS operates with it like SPARSE .
I would think you have something like: Synology, Drobo, NetGear... NAS/Bay.
If yes, Recuva aplication and limited knowlege wont help you to recover data from that array. Dont mess with that if data has some value to you. Better, find someone around who know what to do or request remote help (not for free).

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Angel Data Recovery

Thank you for the replies! So, no, there's nothing of real value on there, although it will take some time to regather the data. I see it more as a challenge - I have never run into this situation and can't find anything directly relatable on the net (totally could be my poor search skills though).

Here's the hardware I was using: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 6816111203

Supposedly the chip / board dying is not unheard of and they are pretty low quality units in general.

I used Stellar to do a lost partition scan and deep scan and it didn't find anything. This is where I am stuck unfortunately, I haven't had the situation where the drive partition doesn't show up at all. Might try EaseUS next. Is reformatting the drive a good idea to get it to show up?

Reformatting is a VERY BAD idea, don’t do it!

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Can you show us a SMART report with CrystalDiskInfo?
https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

Can you show us the partitions window in DMDE?
https://dmde.com/

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So was this running as JBOD, or did you make the disks into a RAID? From the product details, it looks like it should have been showing each disk separately to the computer. If it was JBOD with no RAID, and you can access the data on 3 of the disks but not the 4th, then that disk could be failing (see @fzabkar's post, the part about showing SMART info).

It is also possible that the partition data on that disk somehow got corrupted when the failure happened (see @fzabkar's post, the part about showing partition info).

About the only other possibility is the enclosure was using that disk as having a 4096 byte sector size, but was using the other disks with a 512 byte sector size. It would seem odd that it would only do that with the one drive and not the others, but it is a possibility to look for. Again, see @fzabkar's post, the part about showing partition info with DMDE for this possibility.

EDIT:
One more possibility if that was the only 3TB drive, maybe your single enclosure can't handle drives bigger than 2TB, and is the cause of not being able to properly access it.

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SMART report (looks good) and the DMDE drive info. Let me know if these DMDE windows were the ones that you were looking for.





It was working fine at the 3tb capacity until the night it failed. In theory it supported up to 3tb capacities, 12tb total array size.

DMDE is astonishingly better than the other tools as far as information provided. I'm able to view the entire directory structure within the volume, including all the files. So it seems that one option is just to recover all the files to another drive, reformat this one, and copy back over. Looking through the DMDE manual I can tell the little red x's means something damaged in the GPT, but having trouble understanding exactly what is damaged. Since the x's aren't uniquely formatted, I assume this is one of those if you had any idea what you're doing you'd know that the order they are in tell you what they are. What steps could be taken to potentially fix it, if that's a reasonably safe option vs copying and recopying?

Alright, all data copied with DMDE. Any suggestions on the best way to approach repairing the partition?