(Solved) Unsupported partition layout resulted in drive suddenly has no content

[Squazz]

I have installed windows on an SSD, and is passing the entire SSD to a VM as a SATA device.

Yesterday, after having run windows directly from the SSD and not having unRaid booted up (as is the idea for this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnIn6GnA87c), I noted that one of my drives had the status "unsupported partition layout". As I had parity working just fine I just went with it and formatted the drive to XFS, think I could just rebuild the drive from parity.

 

I formatted the drive, and now it showed up as having no data on it. I guessed this was fine, as I had just formatted it.

 

I stopped the array, unassigned the drive, started the array, stopped the array, reassigned the same drive, and let the rebuild write to the drive in question.
After this was done though, the drive was showing up empty.

Are all of my data gone now? Is there anything I can do?

If unraid is emulating that there's no content on the drive, is that then what will be rebuild onto the drive from parity?

I've shut down the server, in order not to use the array more than needed.

 

It is "just" movies that I have on this drive, so I will be able to recreate my data from my physical backups. but I'd rather not have to do this. As it would be a tiresome process to do so.

Also this sharpened my attention to the fact that "unRaid is not a backup", and I'm happy that my most important (non-recreateable) data is safely backed up off-site

Edited November 22, 2018 by Squazz

[itimpi]

Yes - when you told unRAID to format the drive it created an empty formatted drive, and updated parity in real-time to reflect this.   Any time you write to a drive in unRAID the parity is updated to reflect this (and a format involves writing an empty file system).

 

Parity has no concept of data - just what the contents of any particular sector on a drive (used in conjunction with the contents of the same sector on all other drives) should contain.   As such a rebuild should never have a format as part of the process or it will have the effects of the rebuild resulting in an empty drive.  The UnRAID format option should have warned you that it was not a way to recover data.

 

The chances were that the drive would have been recoverable if you had asked for advice before proceeding, but at this point you have completely overwritten the contents so there is little chance of getting the data back.   Luckily it sounds as if you have backups of this data so that it is not completely lost.

[Squazz]

Dang it, I was afraid that was the case @itimpi

 

But thanks for clearing that up. Now I know what not to do the next time this happens

 

I'll just have to start recreating the data