General advice question

[jolyon]

I am hoping someone will feel kind enough to offer some advice.

looking through the forums I can see that there are some very skilled DR specialists here.

My problem is this.

With the price of HDD's reducing I have bought some 3TB drives over the past 6 months. my system is a home PC with 12 disks attached. the PC is left on and acts as a media server. I have been saving movies onto a HDD instead of physical media for many years and I have never had an issue with data loss or HDD failure. I would usually swap out a smaller drive for a larger one. 1TB-->3TB transferring the files usually in small chunks after I installed and tested the disk for a few days.

This system seemed to work until recently. Today I found out that my computer crashed whilst transferring files and I have lost another drive full of media. it seems that when I am trnsferring files the system hangs and then crashes. I find that I lose the partition I think and when the computer restarts it scans the drives recognizes it as a RAW drive drive deletes all the files and boots up into windows 7 with a drive that appears reformatted with the correct file size but blank with no files.

this happened twice when I was transferring files form one to the other last month and last night I was transferring 200g of media to a 3tb drive only to wake up to a crtashed computer and a black media drive.

At the moment I am 3 3tb drives down of media and I am a little frustrated. The drives work with no issues I believe but the data is lost.

Not only do I not know the cause nor can I seem to repair the disk. -- Any help here would be appreciated.

I have r-studio repair tools but unless a I find a walk through I am not able to navigate it all easily and when I have tried to use the program previously I was not successful. .

I am not sure if the files are even recoverable. I have taken the drives out as soon as this happened and not written to them since. I have tried scanning using r-tools and files are found but I am not sure how to recover them or if they will work.

What I would like to know is if I should have any expectations about actually recovering the files. I am good with computers generally but not advanced.

Any advice would be helpful. I would be grateful if someone could point me in a direction that I can travel down or if someone thinks they can help please let me know.

many thanks

Mark

PS

When I am searching online for guides etc should I be searching for lost partition after crash or lost partition after transferring files in windows? I was not sure which would get me the best results.

[northwind]

PM sent

[jolyon]

Hi Northwind,

Thank you for the PM. I cant reply I am afraid as I am a new user. In response though tot the PM i will purchase a 3 TB hdd and let you know when it gets to me. by then I should be able to PM as well. I will also have the chance to read more of the forum to understand more of the terms of reference you will undoubtedly mention.

many thanks

[northwind]

OK, let me know when/if you're ready.
Till then, and if the data is valuable to you, I suggest you don't power up the drive again.

[Amarbir[CDR-Labs]]

I am hoping someone will feel kind enough to offer some advice.

looking through the forums I can see that there are some very skilled DR specialists here.

My problem is this.

With the price of HDD's reducing I have bought some 3TB drives over the past 6 months. my system is a home PC with 12 disks attached. the PC is left on and acts as a media server. I have been saving movies onto a HDD instead of physical media for many years and I have never had an issue with data loss or HDD failure. I would usually swap out a smaller drive for a larger one. 1TB-->3TB transferring the files usually in small chunks after I installed and tested the disk for a few days.

This system seemed to work until recently. Today I found out that my computer crashed whilst transferring files and I have lost another drive full of media. it seems that when I am trnsferring files the system hangs and then crashes. I find that I lose the partition I think and when the computer restarts it scans the drives recognizes it as a RAW drive drive deletes all the files and boots up into windows 7 with a drive that appears reformatted with the correct file size but blank with no files.

this happened twice when I was transferring files form one to the other last month and last night I was transferring 200g of media to a 3tb drive only to wake up to a crtashed computer and a black media drive.

At the moment I am 3 3tb drives down of media and I am a little frustrated. The drives work with no issues I believe but the data is lost.

Not only do I not know the cause nor can I seem to repair the disk. -- Any help here would be appreciated.

I have r-studio repair tools but unless a I find a walk through I am not able to navigate it all easily and when I have tried to use the program previously I was not successful. .

I am not sure if the files are even recoverable. I have taken the drives out as soon as this happened and not written to them since. I have tried scanning using r-tools and files are found but I am not sure how to recover them or if they will work.

What I would like to know is if I should have any expectations about actually recovering the files. I am good with computers generally but not advanced.

Any advice would be helpful. I would be grateful if someone could point me in a direction that I can travel down or if someone thinks they can help please let me know.

many thanks

Mark

PS

When I am searching online for guides etc should I be searching for lost partition after crash or lost partition after transferring files in windows? I was not sure which would get me the best results.

Hi ,
If you need my help i will be eager to help you on teamviewer with no charge [ If you like me to recover via rstudio ] .

[jolyon]

Thanks Amarbir,

I have bought a drive to clone or transfer files to and as soon as I have the drive and a dedicated computer setup to undertake the data recovery I will post back again and PM Northwind as well. As I have 3 drives with exactly the same issue or circumstance that led to the data loss I will attempt to recover files the lost on those drives as well over the next few weeks.

Hopefully I can keep interest in the thread and post regular updates. it will be interesting to see what recovery rate I can accomplish.

I need to learn the basics of using the software to recover data as well, to then be able to understand when a task is above my understanding and capability. Hopefully the thread can be used to refer others to as well if it helpful.

Thanks

Jolyon