Sorry if this has been answered before - I've done a lot of searching, and it SEEMS that what I want to do should be easy..

Long story short - I have an UnRaid server w/ 4tb and 3tb drives.  I had a house fire, and have recovered the drives, but don't yet have a PC/server to put them into, so I'm trying to recover files from the individual drives.  I have ONE laptop to test/play with..  I've tried LiveCDs, and a VM Ubuntu running on my laptop, and most recently, I installed UnRaid on a new USB stick and booted the laptop from it directly.  I was expecting to be able to mount the individual /dev/sdx1 partitions but the mount command gives me a "special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist".  The partition shows starting on cluster 1, and is type ee. 

 

I've seen threads that mention large drive partition alignment, but from what I'm reading, it should be OK since it was working in my Unraid up 'till the fire.

 

I'm thinking it must be some sort of disk geometry mismatch between the controller that was on the MoBo of the old server, vs. the USB3 external adapter I'm using for rescue purposes...  Can anyone give me any insight or ideas?  I'm REALLY desperate to get some info back, especially since I had the fire.. there's a lot of house documentation I really need to get!!

 

Thanks in advance!!

-Steve

Assuming this is a Windows laptop, you need to install a Linux file system reader.

 

The free Linux Reader works well:  http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/

 

Then you should be able to see the data on your disks with no problem.

 

Thanks for the quick reply, and the idea..  I had tried another Linux filesystem reader, but I hadn't seen this one..  I just tried, and it also sees the drive as "empty" even though I know it's not..  Like I said in the first message, I did boot a live CD, and I booted an actual USB stick with UNRAID on it, figuring that would be the safest, and it DOES see a valid partition table on the disk, of type "ee", containing the whole disk.. 

 

Maybe one thing I can ask - Does fdisk -l on a running UnRaid show the individual disks with partition type of "ee" or is my disk reading incorrectly?  Has anyone else ever mounted an UnRaid disk in an external USB adapter and successfully seen files, either in Linux, or in Windows using an installable file system like this?

 

Thanks for the help!

Try SystemRescueCD.

It could be a problem with those large drives being GPT type, and your laptop not being able to support GPT, at all or just on the USB interface.  You may have to find a newer machine with better GPT support.  I could be wrong though.

 

fdisk will only look at the MBR, which should only show one partition of the entire drive.  I believe you need to use sgdisk instead of fdisk.

@dgaschk..  Thanks..  I'll try that CD..

 

@RobJ..  I'm not too familiar with the requirements to support GPT, but my machine is brand new, and I have some Seagate external 4tb drives formatted for Windows that are working fine (they were supposed to be the ones I'm rescuing the data to!) so if the MACHINE has to be GPT capable, I think I'm good..  If there's any way that the USB enclosure has to also understand GPT, then perhaps there's something to that..  I bought an "Inland" brand USB 3.0 enclosure and put the UnRaid disks into it.

 

I'll have to check the Inland docs to see if they mention such a thing, and/or if anyone knows if GPT would also be a function of the USB enclosure for sure, that'd be a great help.

 

I guess worst case is that I can buy a desktop PC, but since the fire at my house, I'm living in a hotel until the insurance company can find us a rental house, so I was hoping to limit the amount of hardware I buy before I can settle in a little bit!! :-)

 

Thanks!  Things could be a LOT worse..  I could be using a "normal" RAID and not even have this option to recover on a per-disk basis..  UnRaid ROCKS!!

-Steve

I suspect the issue is exactly as already discussed -- GPT drives but no GPT support on the laptop you're using.    [The drives are clearly GPT, since they're 3 & 4 TB drives]

 

I've used a couple of different cheap USB docks for my GPT drives...I've never had a problem.

I'd be very surprised if the Inland dock is the problem. I'd also suspect the laptop.

But..,  If the laptop uses a 4tb Seagate external, does it not imply that the laptop can handle GPT? 

 

It's a brand new (6 week old) Toshiba Satelite i7 with Windows 8.1..

Just tried the SystemRecoveryCD and it didn't like it.. 

 

I think I might just pop open one of these Seagates and try to put my drive in there, and/or just bite the bullet and buy a new server to be my UnRaid box and just deal with having to move more stuff when we get out of the hotel..

After doing some more testing, and reading, I have some new theories, but I'd like to bounce them off the group to see if anyone has any experience with this...

 

When Reading with the "DiskInternals" reader, it told me that the disk was empty.  When reading the disk with fdisk, I see a partition on the whole disk, of type "ee" which I have now read is a partition type saying that there's an EFI partition to follow - Kind of a method to "hide" the disk from being thought empty by an MBR-only aware system.  BUT, when I use the gfdisk, it shows the MBR partition table, but no GPT table.  It wanted to create a new GPT table, but I haven't let it write to the disk yet.

 

I'm wondering if the old UnRaid it came from didn't understand GPT, and so UnRaid fell back and used some other way to access the disk,  whereas my newer machine now has native GPT support so it's trying to do the "right" thing???

Do all the drives act the same?

Yes.. no indication of read errors, and the two of the five I've plugged in look exactly the same, and act exactly the same re: partition type and status..  That's why I'm hopeful that it's just me misunderstanding  or a misconfiguration or something with the new hardware..

 

I'm wondering if the old UnRaid it came from didn't understand GPT, and so UnRaid fell back and used some other way to access the disk,  whereas my newer machine now has native GPT support so it's trying to do the "right" thing???

 

No, that's not the issue.  Older versions of UnRAID simply didn't support drives > 2TB.  Since these were being used in UnRAID, it had to be a new enough version to have support for the larger drives.

 

But..,  If the laptop uses a 4tb Seagate external, does it not imply that the laptop can handle GPT? 

 

It's a brand new (6 week old) Toshiba Satelite i7 with Windows 8.1..

 

Clearly this laptop has proper GPT support, so that's not the issue either.

 

Hopefully the drives themselves are still good.

 

Assuming that's true, it's not clear why the drives can't be correctly seen via your USB bridge device; but I'd STOP and be sure you do NOTHING to the drives until you have a chance to try them with a direct SATA connection.

 

On a PC with a direct SATA connection to the drives, you should certainly be able to see the data with Linux Reader.    Or, alternatively, you could simply boot to an UnRAID flash disk and assign them as DATA drives (do NOT assign a parity drive -- and don't do ANY writes ... you just want to read the data from the drives).    If you do the latter, be CERTAIN you don't accidentally assign one of the system's other drives to UnRAID 

 

Yep..  I think that's my next step..  I'm heading to the computer store now to buy a case/PS/MoBo/Proc, monitor, etc..  :-)  My wife isn't going to like the idea, but she'll get over it when I find all the family pictures!  :-)

 

-Steve

Thanks to ALL who helped..  I'm now home from work, via the local MicroCenter store, and after spending an hour putting together my new $750 PC, I'm happy to report that the first drive is up, and I see all the files as expected..

 

SO.. The moral(a) of the story is (are):

 

1: UnRaid RULES, if only for the ability to recover data off of each drive individually, rather than having to have the entire set of disks up and running as would be the case with a traditional RAID..  AND..

 

2:  Backup OFFSITE!  I'm the second post today from someone who got REALLY lucky and recovered data after a catastrophic event, but you can't count on it.  Crashplan, or similar service is GREAT!!

 

3:  USB Drive enclosures are NOT all created equal.  Although Linux saw the el-cheapo "Inland" brand USB enclosure and drive, and saw the GPT partition table, for some reason, it would not let me mount the UnRaid drive until I connected the drive into a normal SATA port..

 

Thanks again for all the help!

-Steve

Glad it all worked out -- as I noted earlier, a direct SATA connection will often work better than connecting through a USB bridge device.    Clearly you've proven that point 

Glad it all worked out -- as I noted earlier, a direct SATA connection will often work better than connecting through a USB bridge device.    Clearly you've proven that point 

 

Yep.. definitely proven true, although I can't understand why..  Seems like once you have a device capable of passing data from SATA to USB, it would be transparent, but OBVIOUSLY something was different..  It's good to have it documented, in case someone else sees the same problem..

 

Thanks!

The signaling is different -- there are more control lines available with a direct SATA interface, and apparently some of those matter ... although I'm also surprised that the bridge device doesn't manage that better.