Resolution: File Scanvenger successfully recovered files and has allowed me to sort through them all. It sucks this happened but at least I got stuff back.

 

Unraid became very sluggish and unresponsive, knocking out explorer.exe on my computer after just a couple of options in the web GUI or just straight up after a couple hours with no VMs running. I decided to reinstall from scratch which has fixed these issues. The new problem is that I accidentally assigned my main data drive as a second parity where it became unmountable once I changed it to a data drive. A party check was not run when it was added as a second parity, however. I've already ran a parity check once I fixed my mistake as well a sxfs_repair -v per the wiki which was unablet to find any working superblocks.Window utilities to read xfs drives failed to work and threads found here have not worked either.

 

What can I do to fix this issue as it has all of my data. I've not bought additional drives yet though will definitely do so after this. The diagnostics zip will be found attached. I have the backup of my old unraid install and can get diagnostics from that if needed. And because I know someone will ask, yes, the right 4TB drive is in the parity slot. Before I enabled the array I put the backup unraid onto the flash drive and took a picture to make sure to avoid this exact situation.

ground-diagnostics-20160517-0807.zip

If you assigned it as a 2nd parity drive and then started the array the data has almost certainly been wiped from that drive.    I'd just bite the bullet and reformat it; then copy your data back to the array from your backups.

 

The best tool seems to be TestDisk, a live CD (or put it on a bootable USB drive).  If you didn't allow the parity build to run too long, it has a good reputation for finding lost files and partitions.

Depending on what filesystem was on it, these are the programs to try:

 

FTKImager (http://accessdata.com/product-download)

File Scavanger  (http://www.quetek.com/download.htm)

UFS Explorer Professional Recovery (http://www.sysdevlabs.com/product.php?id=ufsxp5&os=win)

 

These can recover the actual filesystem, and not just carve for certain types of files (like jpg)

 

All are free or have free trials.

 

And don't let Windows write to the drive (i.e. put a signature on it or partition it).

Update: Plugged the disk into my computer through the onboard SATA bus instead of a USB adapter and the programs are finding it instead of a RAW drive. Doing a long (deep) scan using File Scavenger currently though that'll take 7 hours. I see 376GB on it so the data's there and am confident I can retrieve it all in tact.

 

Thank you for the replies, everyone. I'll try the four tools out to see if any of them help and update when I find more.

 

To garycase: What if I told you there are no backups yet? Would I get slapped for derping?

... To garycase: What if I told you there are no backups yet? Would I get slapped for derping?

 

No slapping      Unfortunately there are a lot of folks who don't seem to bother with backups (I'm definitely NOT one of them).

 

... I'm a very strong believer in backups -- if data's important enough to build a fault-tolerant server, it would certainly seem that it's important enough to back it up.

 

Update: I was finally able to recover a bunch of stuff with File Scanvenger. Still shifting through so many documents and pictures, however it's all off the hdd and onto a spare on. I didn't do a deep format of this before using it and recovered a heck of a lot of pictures and documents that don't relate to me. I even found a form filled out by the director of technologies at 2K games ordering the Havok physics engine with his signature. I am definitely going to have a better backup in place as I can understand losing a bunch of pictures that didn't mean much and losing family pictures, documents, resumes, receipts, and everything else in one huge derp. Homelab or not that is way too unacceptable.

 

This thread can be closed as it has been resolved.

I want to point out that this illustrates one drawback of unRAID moving to xfs preference over ReiserFS.... and that is file recovery utilities, like File Scavenger, only work with certain filesystems, and many more work with ReiserFS than work with xfs so it limits your choices.