New user, needs help with recovery.

[todd93]

Hi, I have 2 WD1001FALS 1TB drives that I had in an external enclosure. Windows saw the setup as one 2TB external drive. Unfortunately my enclosure Stopped working, so I purchased a Sabrent USB Docking Bay EC-HD2B as a replacement. Unfortunately my drives are now seen as "unallocated space". I have performed numerous scans in Gentoo, and can see that there is data there, and that the file system is NTFS. Is there a way to recover these disks, mainly the data, and render the disks usable again? I do have a new 1TB solid state drive on the way to use as possible storage for each of the disks in case I need to have a place to stage the data while the other disks are being reformatted...

Any and all help is appreciated!

Thanks!

[fzabkar]

Can you show us the Partitions window in DMDE?

https://dmde.com/

[todd93]

Can you show us the Partitions window in DMDE?

https://dmde.com/

This is my first experience with DMDE, if I need to do a different scan, then please let me know! As you see, it's seeing the NTFS partition on both drives, and you see it's reporting as 2TB, which is what it did in the previous enclosure, 2 1TB drives showed up as one 2TB...

Thanks

Todd

Attachments

[fzabkar]

The first screenshot is the second drive in your RAID pair. The second screenshot corresponds to the first drive.

If you can install both drives inside your computer, DMDE should be able to assemble the 2TB RAID and give you access to your data. Playing around with your new enclosure may be risky.

Edit:

I'm wondering whether the two drives constitute a JBOD, in which case you may be able to recover some data from the first drive. If you d-click the NTFS volume, do you see your file/folder tree under the $Root? If so, r-click a large test file (eg a large graphics or multimedia file) and recover it to another drive. If the test file plays or displays correctly, then you have a JBOD.

[todd93]

The first screenshot is the second drive in your RAID pair. The second screenshot corresponds to the first drive.

If you can install both drives inside your computer, DMDE should be able to assemble the 2TB RAID and give you access to your data. Playing around with your new enclosure may be risky.

Edit:

I'm wondering whether the two drives constitute a JBOD, in which case you may be able to recover some data from the first drive. If you d-click the NTFS volume, do you see your file/folder tree under the $Root? If so, r-click a large test file (eg a large graphics or multimedia file) and recover it to another drive. If the test file plays or displays correctly, then you have a JBOD.

Ok, I successfully recovered a large media file! So I apparently have a JBOD? Is there a way to get this all back like it was? Or is it best to recover everything to one drive, and just reformat the old drives for future use?

Thanks,

Todd

[fzabkar]

It looks like you have a JBOD (a spanned volume). DMDE should be able to stitch the two halves of the NTFS volume together.

Select Disk -> Construct RAID, and then select RAID Auto Calculate (Scan) from the drop-down list.

Then select Menu -> Add Disk and add each of your two disks.

If this doesn't produce a spanned volume, we can still select the start and end LBAs manually.

In any case, if you work only with the first drive, you can recover all the files which exist on this drive, as long as none of their fragments also exist on the second drive.

[Amarbir[CDR-Labs]]

It looks like you have a JBOD (a spanned volume). DMDE should be able to stitch the two halves of the NTFS volume together.

Select Disk -> Construct RAID, and then select RAID Auto Calculate (Scan) from the drop-down list.

Then select Menu -> Add Disk and add each of your two disks.

If this doesn't produce a spanned volume, we can still select the start and end LBAs manually.

In any case, if you work only with the first drive, you can recover all the files which exist on this drive, as long as none of their fragments also exist on the second drive.

Frank ,
He Can even try UFS Pro To See if he can construct this or Recovery explorer .

[todd93]

It looks like you have a JBOD (a spanned volume). DMDE should be able to stitch the two halves of the NTFS volume together.

Select Disk -> Construct RAID, and then select RAID Auto Calculate (Scan) from the drop-down list.

Then select Menu -> Add Disk and add each of your two disks.

If this doesn't produce a spanned volume, we can still select the start and end LBAs manually.

In any case, if you work only with the first drive, you can recover all the files which exist on this drive, as long as none of their fragments also exist on the second drive.

Thank you for the help so far... Here is what the scan produced from the steps you laid out:

Thanks

Todd

Attachments

[todd93]

I. I'm not typically one to "bump" a thread, and believe me, I know how annoying that can be... But I feel that I'm close to resolving my issue, if anyone could step in and help me finish this, I would deeply appreciate it!

Thanks

Todd

[DRUG]

I. I'm not typically one to "bump" a thread, and believe me, I know how annoying that can be... But I feel that I'm close to resolving my issue, if anyone could step in and help me finish this, I would deeply appreciate it!

Thanks

Todd

I can help you out. Give me anydesk or TeamViewer details so K can analyze this remotely.

[todd93]

I. I'm not typically one to "bump" a thread, and believe me, I know how annoying that can be... But I feel that I'm close to resolving my issue, if anyone could step in and help me finish this, I would deeply appreciate it!

Thanks

Todd

I can help you out. Give me anydesk or TeamViewer details so K can analyze this remotely.

Hard pass.

[DRUG]

I. I'm not typically one to "bump" a thread, and believe me, I know how annoying that can be... But I feel that I'm close to resolving my issue, if anyone could step in and help me finish this, I would deeply appreciate it!

Thanks

Todd

I can help you out. Give me anydesk or TeamViewer details so K can analyze this remotely.

Hard pass.

Well, your issue, not mine.

I really do hope you recover the data instead of worsening your chances by going the DIY route.

[todd93]

I. I'm not typically one to "bump" a thread, and believe me, I know how annoying that can be... But I feel that I'm close to resolving my issue, if anyone could step in and help me finish this, I would deeply appreciate it!

Thanks

Todd

I can help you out. Give me anydesk or TeamViewer details so K can analyze this remotely.

Hard pass.

Well, your issue, not mine.

I really do hope you recover the data instead of worsening your chances by going the DIY route.

You're acting like I'm completely computer illiterate... I'm not, I'm actually quite skilled. In fact, I've spent extensive time in Gentoo, and other Linux distros... When I say "new user", it's meant to be "new FORUM user"...

Let me ask you, would you trust a stranger in some far away land full access to your machine? Mine contains some financial data, etc... That's not going to happen...

The diy route will work just fine, in fact, I was making great progress, but those who were helping me seem to have not offered anymore advice.

[fzabkar]

Sorry, @todd93, I do want to help you, but I didn't see any post after Amarbir's until now.

It appears that DMDE did not detect the spanned volume, so you will need to find where the first half ends and the second half starts. To this end you could examine the relevant areas of the two drives and look for discontinuities.

[fzabkar]

To construct a spanned volume in DMDE, we go to ...

Drive -> Construct RAID
select JBOD/Spanned from dropdown list
Menu -> Add Disk -> OK
r-click disk and select Partition / Offset / Segment
select appropriate values for First, Last and Number of Sectors

For the first drive, the first and last sectors appear to be 0 and 1953525167.

For the second drive, choose 0 and 1953514977.

When the span has been assembled, try to view the partition window for the spanned pair. Hopefully the boot sector (B) and boot sector copy (C) will now be in the right places (see Indicators column). If so, then d-click the spanned NTFS volume and expand the $Root.

In short it appears that the two drives are stitched together without any gap in between. I could be wrong though.

[todd93]

To construct a spanned volume in DMDE, we go to ...

Drive -> Construct RAID
select JBOD/Spanned from dropdown list
Menu -> Add Disk -> OK
r-click disk and select Partition / Offset / Segment
select appropriate values for First, Last and Number of Sectors

For the first drive, the first and last sectors appear to be 0 and 1953525167.

For the second drive, choose 0 and 1953514977.

When the span has been assembled, try to view the partition window for the spanned pair. Hopefully the boot sector (B) and boot sector copy (C) will now be in the right places (see Indicators column). If so, then d-click the spanned NTFS volume and expand the $Root.

In short it appears that the two drives are stitched together without any gap in between. I could be wrong though.

I get the following.. Do I need to perform a scan? Or is this the assembly?

Attachments

[fzabkar]

The first drive is the one in your second screenshot. The second drive is the one in your first screen shot. Did you mix them up?

[todd93]

The first drive is the one in your second screenshot. The second drive is the one in your first screen shot. Did you mix them up?

I think I did, I reversed the drive order from what I previously did, and I get the following:

Attachments

[fzabkar]

The BCF indicators are in the right place, but the partition table points to sector 63 rather than 79. That's an anomaly, but it's not a problem.

D-click $Noname and expand the $Root. Those should be your files. You can now recover them to another drive (r-click and Recover). The free version of DMDE is limited to 4000 files from any one folder per session. The standard version costs US$20.

Good luck.

[todd93]

Thank you so much for all your help! I deeply appreciate it!