Spanned Drive / New Motherboard, please help 1

[Drunlar]

I know this is a long read, I tried to give all the information on my situation I could think of

so bear with me...

I had a 5 hard drive span made using Window 7 Ultimate 64bit. This was a secondary data only

drive not my primary boot drive. My motherboard died and I was forced to replace it. When I

rebooted my spanned drive was missing. I opened commuter manager and found all 5 drives in disk

manager and all were unmounted. I selected the option to repair the span and it said this span

contained '3 of 3' drives. Knowing this was wrong and it consisted of 5 drives I didn't continue

and let Window try to fix it.

I then ran TestDisk and on one of my disks I got a message about the drive not being the correct

size and on another drive I got a message saying 'Bad Jump in Fat Partition'. Unfortunately

TestDisk didn't give me any information on fixing the problem or prompting on how to do it.

I also booted into Gparted on USB and let it look for my hard drives for 2 days before I gave up.

I was thinking this was because it is 12TB of drives at first but after 2 days I think something

just went wrong. This hang was at the initial window where it says loading drives or scanning or

something like that.

I scoured the web looking for help and just couldn't find anything that fit my situation and had

an answer to the problem.

Please note in my spanned array I had 2 identical drives and of course while switching

Motherboards I unplugged all drives and have no idea if I plugged them back in the same

locations. I read on the web that, that can be an issue.

I think my span and drives are fine but windows doesn't know the order for reading them.

At this point I have no idea how to repair this issue or pull the information off the span. I

haven't seen any software that detects my situation or gives recommendations and I can't find any

information on the web that helps. I wouldn't mind paying a bit to get this data back but I would

hate exceeding $100.

Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas? please any thoughts here would help as I have hit a

wall and I am afraid of doing anything for fear or ruining the boot sectors on my drives.

PS: I ordered 2, 3TB drives due in 3 days so if I come up with a way to pull the data off the

drives I will have drives to put the data on.
I think originally I made a 3 disk Span with Windows and later added 2 more disks to the span.

Not sure if that's important information or not

Is there software that can tell me what the original cable order was or instructions on

HexEditing the hard drive sectors to get this information or well any help would be appreciated.

 

[goombawaho]

I think you are hosed UNLESS the motherboard controller has a setting to "read configuration from drives" where it could put the configuration back based on reading the RAID setup on the drives. It was likely a BIG mistake not to note the ports that each hard drive was plugged into and recreate that.

I wouldn't mind paying a bit to get this data back but I would hate exceeding $100.

Think more like $750 - $1000 if you sent it out for professional recovery.

Not piling on, but......... Where is your backup? Especially if it wasn't a fault tolerant setup - very risky.

 

[Drunlar]

Thanks for your response even if its bad news.

You know I knew I was living life on the edge without a backup on those drives. I was waiting for the cost of hard drives to come back down to a normal price before making a backup array (foolish me). Although it probably wouldn't have helped since I didn't know it was important to keep the cables in the same place. I would have screwed up the backup array as well.

 

[BadBigBen]

Backup ALWAYS to an external device, ergo keep thinks separated for events just like what you just have gone through...

was it really a SPAN (aka JBOD) or STRIPE (aka RAID 0), because with the former you might have a real good chance of recovering data...

where as with a RAID 0, you definitely will have a few problems, but you really have nothing to loose, the drives are in working condition, and here I would attempt the usage of a RAID Recovery Software, like:

Active@File Recovery
Virtually Reassemble a Deleted or Damaged RAID. RAID 0 - RAID 5 Data Recovery

http://www.file-recovery.net/raid.htm

RAID Recovery for Windows V1.32

http://www.runtime.org/raid-recovery-windows.htm

also have a look at the following FAQ:

RAID 0 Data Recovery FAQ

http://www.vantagetech.com/faq/raid-0-recovery-faq.html

(on the HOMEPAGE there is the contact information to Vantage, you could always call and find out a quote on how much it would cost having the data recovered)

if you decide to attempt to recover the data yourself, then be aware of the following:

- ALWAYS work with IMAGES of the drive -

to prevent the damage to the heads & platters of said drives.
this would entail getting:

1.) more drives at this stage to hold the data/images
2.) getting a hold of a IMAGING software that the recovery software can work with...

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[Drunlar]

As it turns out it was a span and not a stripe (I got lucky). As I mentioned I used the Windows 7 disk manager to create it and I didn't know if it was span or stripe. I got my new hard drives in and had enough room to play with the drives. I ran PhotoRec and it was recovering all of the files off of one hard drive letting me know it wasn't a stripe. My new problem is PhotoRec doesn't retain the file names or folder structure. The bad span is more than 6 TB of data.

That amount of files without names and folder structure is an unimaginable task to resort so I am still looking for a better way to recover the data.

 

[BadBigBen]

Try GetDataBack, it is costly but worth it's money in times like this, you can test the software first before you decide to purchase...

GetDataBack

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[goombawaho]

I was thinking it was a RAID 0. You're right that you were lucky that it wasn't. Still, this is ugly.

 

[Drunlar]

I figured I would give you an update in case you are wondering. The battle continues. I have been trying all of the software suggested by "BadBigBen".

I tried "GetDataBack" and it looked very promising unfortunately when it went to scan the drive it hung and locked the OS so bad I had to logout to kill it not even killing it in task manager worked. I tried 3 times and it hung every time at the part that isn't supposed to hang this is before the actual scan on the drives. They have some incompatibility issue of bug with my setup.

I then tried "RAID Recovery for Windows" I liked how I could just keep trying combinations till I got it to work. The tools attempt to auto determine the drive order and failed. I then tried all 125 possible combinations in a 5 drive configuration and none of them worked. My best guess as to why this won't work is when i initially made the span it was a span of 3 drives that I added 2 more drives to later. I think windows did something odd with that combination making something under the covers that was called a 3 drive + 2 or something like that. This is why when I attempt to use windows to import then it says it only found a 3 drive span.

As a side note, due to the size of the drives I know what the first 3 drives were and the other 2. I did some unplugging and re plugging in and discovered that windows and I agree as to the 3 initial drives / those are the ones windows wants to import at the entire span.

Next I tried "Active@ File Recovery". This software lets you try different combinations like "RAID Recovery for Windows" but it is very slow to use for that. The more interesting thing is on top of just finding the drives it detected the 3 drive span partition like windows found. Since this tool will let me create virtual drives attempting combinations without committing and wrecking the original drives this gives me the chance to just try the 3 drive span alone and see whats inside of that. I made the 3 drive virtual span however you need to scan it before you can look at what it created. I started to do the on the 5.5 TB of 3 drive span 16 hours ago and its 70% complete now. I know its supposed to take a long time and that's OK, its just where I am at now ;-)

 

[rclarke250]

Raid recovery won't be any use, as you don't have a raid array, you have a span, so basically it makes multiple drives appear as one giant drive, by attaching each drive to the end of the previous drive, so you have a large virtual drive. But unlike a raid 0 it doesn't stripe the data packets across all of the drives, it would write the data in a sequential pattern on an individual drive if possible as each drive becomes full, it would then go to the next drive. You should be able to recover the files using something like getdataback, even if it is one drive at a time. The only missing data would be the data that spans 2 drives, which should me very minimal. I would try hooking the drives up in another computer and running a recovery tool on the drives one at a time, to recover what I could.

 

[goombawaho]

My mind boggles at this whole mess.

 

[Drunlar]

I wanted to thank everyone for your feedback. Especially BadBigBen for those wonderful helpful links and all of that information.

It looks like I have a full recovery now I am just trying to get all of the data off the spanned drives so I can break the span and reclaim those drives for backup drives. I am now nickel and dimeing old machines, thumb drives, etc to try to get enough room for the last another 600megs of data. ;-)

It would appear I got over nervous and if I had just took the plunge and let windows attempt to fix the problem it would have worked. Of course thats risky when it could have just as easily wiped all data.

Once I got my replacement drives I made images of the first 3 drives so I had backup in case something went wrong. I was then interested in the fact that "Active@ File Recovery" said I have a 3 drive span just like windows yet didn't recognize the other 2 drives. Since "Active@ File Recovery" could see the data (in 3 of the drives ONLY) I decided to let window import the 3 visible drives like "Active@ File Recovery" wanted to do. Here is the crazy part i did the import in Windows and it recreated the full 5 drive span using all drives and all data was there even though it said it only saw 3 disks of the span and the other 2 were not part of the span.

I am thinking that because I made a 3 drive span with windows and then used windows to add 2 more drives later, windows imported the first 3 drives and once that was done it saw something like an additional instruction set withing the first 3 drives that said "Oh yeah add these other 2 as well".

Guess I got lucky, I hope this information can help others in the future with similar issues.

Thanks everyone.

 

[BadBigBen]

I am glad that you are on your way to recovering your data...

and thank you for posting back and letting us know at which stage you are on with the situation at hand...

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"