January 29, 201412 yr Hi, I'm new at this so I'm not sure if this is the right place for my question. Admins please move me to the right place if needed. Yesterday I started to get ready to run Unraid. I placed 2 3Tb drives for my server. On one of them I had about 2Tb of data and I chose it to be the parity drive thinking it would just synchronize with the other drive. Now I cant find my data anywhere. I moved that drive back to my pc but I guess it has already being changed to lynux. I've been searching everywhere I cant seem to find an answer. I found that I could use some software in order for windows to recognize the hdd but I wanted to make sure that would be safe or even if my data is still there. Can anyone help me figure out how to fix this. Could my data still be there or if I can at least recover it with a recovery software. Any help would be really appreciate it. Thank you.
January 29, 201412 yr If you allowed the system to run a parity sync -- which is the first thing it would do when you Started the array -- then your data is gone. You assigned the drive as parity, so that's exactly what UnRAID used it for. It stored the parity values for the rest of your array on that drive -- doesn't matter if the rest of the array is one drive or 23 more drives. Your data on that drive is gone -- you'll just need to copy it back to a new drive on UnRAID from your backups.
January 29, 201412 yr Author That's exactly what I didn't want to hear . Thank you for the reply. Unfortunately I didn't have much of that data anywhere else. One more thing, that data used to be on the other 3Tb drive which was formatted. You think it would be possible to recover it using a software? Do you know of any other software to bring those drives back to windows os
January 29, 201412 yr If the same data was on the other drive, and you haven't written new data to UnRAID, then the only thing that's been done to that drive is to format it for the Reiserfs file system. A good recovery program MAY be able to recover the old data from it. Attach the drive to a Windows PC; download and install the free demo of GetDataBack for NTFS [ http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm ]; then see if it can "see" the old data. If so, you'll need to buy a license. If not, try this: http://www.easeus.com/ad/format-recovery.htm If neither of those can "see" your old partition and data, it's unlikely you can recover the data short of professional data recovery, which would cost several hundred dollars. If the data's worth that to you, try Gillware, which is reasonably priced (by recovery standards) and has a "no recovery, no fee" policy [but plan to pay -- they're VERY good ]. www.gillware.com
January 29, 201412 yr Author Thanks a lot garycase. I'll give it a try right away. I tried this software about 20 mins ago "Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery" but it just cant detect the drives. I guess it's due to a different os. Hopefully the one you told me will work. Thanks again
January 29, 201412 yr Author ok so far GetDataBack for NTFS is finding arount 30k files . It should take about 5hrs to complete. I'll leave it overnight and hopefully I'll have greats news to post tomorrow.
January 29, 201412 yr Note that (a) you have to buy a license to actually do the recovery (the free download will show you WHAT it can recover, but won't actually recover it); and (b) it requires another drive with sufficient space for the recovered files to store them on -- like any good recover utility, it will NOT write to the drive it's working on. You could, of course, delete the Linux partition and format the drive you had used as parity to provide this space if you don't have another drive to use.
January 29, 201412 yr Author Garycase I was able to recover all of my data, or at least most of it. I'm still in the process so I'm not 100% sure of what was the software able to recover. I can finally relax now lol, I couldn't stop from thinking about all that data just gone. In moments like this is when you realize how useful and important Unraid is in case of a drive failure. Thank you for all the help. Hopefully this doesn't happen again to any newbie
January 29, 201412 yr Great. FWIW, if you want to try UnRAID without losing all your data in the process [ ], and only have 2 drives, with the data on one of them (which now seems to be the case), here's what you can do ... (1) Assign ONE of the drives to UnRAID as a data drive (you're going to lose all of the files on this drive, so choose carefully !!). At this point you'll have an UnRAID array with one data drive and no parity. Start the array and let it format the drive. (2) Copy all of the data from the other drive to your UnRAID array. Now all of your data is on the UnRAID data drive (in the ReiserFS file system). (3) Stop the array and shut down. Add the 2nd drive to the array (we're now going to wipe it and use it as parity). Boot it up, Stop the array, and assign the drive you just added as the parity drive. Start the array and let it do the initial parity sync. You now have a protected array, with all of your data intact Note, of course, that you should ALWAYS have backups of your data. Neither UnRAID nor any other RAID, is a backup. You may want to read my post here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31020.0
January 30, 201412 yr Author Thanks again garycase thats great. I could use that info later on. Fortunately I have another drive(1Tb) plus another of 80gb and an external drive (1Tb). So for now I'm finishing up with the recovery and should be all set in another hr or 2. If it wasn't for your help I would still be going mad trying to fing a way to recover all that valuable data. And thank you for sharing that other post. Number 4 fits me very well as most of those 2Tb of data that i had lost were all movies.
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