The array was showing as all fine but I'd been getting notifications from fix common problems that my drive (disk2) was failing and my weekly parity check had slowed down to a crawl.

 

 

This is my old config

 

 

I ordered a new drive, patiently waited for it to arrive, shut the system down, pulled the old disk. Put in a new one, booted back up. I assigned the new disk to the slot (disk2), started the array and clicked the button to format the new drive.

 

I came back the next day to see that the new drive was in the array but it's empty. All the files that used to be on that disk were gone.

Because I'm a complete idiot, in between these points I'd taken the failing disk and put it into my desktop and quick formatted it to NTFS. If I hadn't done this I'd be able to just mount it and copy the XFS files off the disk.

 

 

 

 

 

Is there any chance that my old data could still be sitting in the parity? Does anyone have any clues as to how this could have happened?

 

Appreciate your support and assistance. Thank you

Edited August 29, 20214 yr by adamreid
fixed wrong screenshot

Your mistake was to format the drive despite the warning that this would wipe the contents and upgrade parity accordingly, and that format is not part of a data recovery process.   Without that your data should have been there.   As you found it is always a good idea to keep the original drive intact until the rebuild has completed successfully.

 

it is possible software like UFS Explorer on Windows might be able to recover data off the drive since a format does not actually clear the file sectors - merely rewrites the file system control structures.