So I accidentally assigned one of my NTFS drive to the array and hit the format button.  I have not backed up the data on that drive yet.  It was never precleared.

 

Can I recover?  Please say yes and show me how.

 

Edit:

Once I pressed format and realized my mistake, I logged to the console and issued the powerdown (unMenu) command.  When I powered the server back up, the disk showed up as formatted.  I thought unRAID was suppose to perform some kind of preclearing?  I was hoping to catch performing a pre-read or something.

 

Anyway, if unRAID performed a quick format to make it a ReiserFS disk, can I easily turn it back into an NTFS disk?

Most likely you can.  You'll need to use an NTFS data recovery program.  There are plenty of free options that you can try (maybe start with the ones included with UBCD).  If none of those work, then I've had huge amounts of success with GetDataBack NTFS, though it costs $80 for the full version.  There's a free version you can try, but I think it only allows you to recover some percentage of the data.

I once needed to take an NTFS disk that has been formatted as RFS to try and recover some files that I had lost and had been on that drive before being added to my array. 

 

I used that GetDataBack program and it worked pretty well, and I was to get several of the files I was looking for.

 

Obviously, the more writes you do to the disk the worse chance you have to recover.

You could also try one of these Handy Recovery or NTFS Undelete

unRAID does not clear a drive if you have not yet assigned a parity drive. (or if it determines a drive was pre-cleared)

 

unRAID does no pre-reading or post-reading of a drive it clears.

 

Hopefully the NTFS recovery tool will help you.

 

Joe L.

It appears the only tools that appeared to be able to recognize the lost folder and files was Handy Recover.  I also tried NTFS Undelete and TestDisk.  Both had problem with the ReiserFS partition.

 

Anyway, Handy Recover scans the entire disk for files.  Most of which (85%) had a good probability of being recovered and the rest were poor.  Given that the files were DVD rips, one poor file would render the disk unplayable.  So I decided that it would take me longer to recover the files vs. re-ripping the disks.

 

Final Resolution: Cut my lost (2 TB) and zero the drive.

Really?  85% sounds pretty good to me.  I would rather rerip 15% of 2 TB than 100% of 2 TB...

My guess of 85% was by eyeballing and this was at half the disk scanned.  What I wasn't really looking forward to is pulling a good disk out of the unRAID and prep it as NTFS.  Then I would have to manually select which are good rips to recover and then after recovering, verify if the video plays completely problem free.

 

Then it occurred to me that I can rip 4 SD DVDs under 10 minutes (including tray loading and unloading) and so it would take be about the same amount of time, much less if you factor in the time to verify every recovered rips, in addition to the headache of pulling disks and reconfiguring unRAID.

 

In the end, I would have a much higher confidence level of my media library if I just re-ripped.