Trying to see what is on an old data drive. (SOLVED)


JP

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I have had to troubleshoot some things with my Unraid drive and have made good progress.  Currently, I'm rebuilding a data drive and it seems to be going fine.  I am still on Unraid 6.7.0 and probably won't upgrade until I feel like what I have is stable.  

 

The biggest problem I have is I had to pull an old failing data drive and rebuild parity without it as a result of a number of issues happening at once.  That old data drive did not have much on it, but now I've discovered it did have one thing, a family video of the events leading up to the birth of my daughter so I'm hoping there might be a way to get this data back.  I think I know what might give me a chance to look on this drive, but before doing so, I thought I would ask to be sure.

 

I'm assuming this is what UNASSIGNED DRIVES can be used for.  Basically, I should be able to install the old data drive (hope hope hope that it mounts), create a share for it, and then I would be able to see the contents of the drive without adding it to the array.  Is that correct or should I be approaching this issue from a different angle?

 

 

Edited by JP
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11 minutes ago, JP said:

 

I'm assuming this is what UNASSIGNED DRIVES can be used for.  Basically, I should be able to install the old data drive (hope hope hope that it mounts), create a share for it, and then I would be able to see the contents of the drive without adding it to the array.

That's it in a nutshell. Depending on your financial situation and desire to recover the files, you may be better off sending it to a data recovery firm, but that bill would end with 3 zeroes before the decimal.

 

If it's highly valued data, perhaps waiting until everything (and I do mean everything) stabilizes and settles down before attempting anything would be more prudent.

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Thanks.  I'll give it a try, but if I seem to remember correctly, it wouldn't mount.  Come to think of it, I might get super lucky if it turns out to be why it wouldn't mount was because of a bad sata cable.  I eventually found that out during my recent troubleshooting, which partially led to why it seemed so many things failed at once (never happened before with unraid).  I just can't remember if it was this exact sata cable that was causing the issue.  I'll be finding out once this data rebuild completes.   

 

Yea, I kinda thought it probably would be in the thousands to have a third-party try to resurrect the data.  It is "only" sentimental data that I would be losing, but that's something.  I kick myself pretty hard because I actually do have a backup plan where all my family videos / photos as well as valued data are put on an external hard drive that resides in a fire-proof safe.  However, in this single case (and who knows why) I put the video in with my Movies, which I don't place nearly as much value on and I don't backup.  Lesson learned. 

 

Fyi - I'm not going to mark this post as SOLVED just yet until I try old data drive with the unassigned devices.  I might have some follow-up questions if something goes sideways.  Thanks again for your help.

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1 minute ago, Squid said:

Or alternatively, https://www.easeus.com/ running in Windows.  Inexpensive compared to the wrath of your wife for the loss of the file(s), and works great (The free trial will give you an idea of what it will manage to recover)

 

Thank you so much Squid!  I've never heard of this, but it will certainly be my next step if UD doesn't work.  

 

PS - For the record, my wife is pretty great.  She knew I took this harder than she did because I felt responsible.  She didn't think it was the end of the world.  Lucky guy.

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1 minute ago, trurl said:

If it is still unmountable, it is possible that the filesystem can be repaired. Do you know what filesystem the drive should have on it?

 

Hmmmm...I think reiserfs.  Let me see if I can dig up some old screenshots of the drive in use that would show me.

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Well, not exactly what I expected.  The rebuild of the data drive went fine.  I added the old data drive to see if I could see what was on it, but once I powered up the server I noticed my SATA controller card seemed to be missing a drive.  Unraid started up and my parity drive was reporting all kinds of read errors.  So maybe another new sata cable?  Maybe the sata controller card has gone bad?  Not sure at this point.

 

Anyway, to not get too far off topic, the old data drive did show up in unassigned devices, but it didn't seem like it wanted to mount.  I chose for it to auto-mount and provide a share, but once I started the array, I don't see it it my drive list from FIle Explorer in Windows.  The drive is reporting a temperature and I could get a SMART test from it, but that seems to be it.  The SMART information is attached in case that provides any more information.  

 

This old data drive is installed directly into the motherboard so I don't think the sata controller card is the problem in this case.  I don't know why, but it seems the instant I plug this drive in, other things just seem to fail.  I suspect I'll need to rebuilt the parity again since it now says parity is disabled.  This is all so odd.

tower-smart-20200322-1905.zip

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People sometimes disturb connections to other drives when they are installing a drive. Another possibility is insufficient power for the number of drives, but you don't give any details for that so maybe that isn't a concern. I have also seen cases where a bad drive connected will make everything else not work well.

 

Yes, you will have to rebuild the disabled parity, after you get the hardware working right.

 

SMART for that disk indicates it is failing and shouldn't be used, but if you can get it to work with everything else maybe we can get something off of it. If the disk won't mount with Unassigned Devices, then obviously it can't be shared. But it might be possible to repair its filesystem and then get it to mount.

 

Or maybe try that other software Squid mentioned and connect it to your PC with a USB dock of some sort.

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1 hour ago, trurl said:

People sometimes disturb connections to other drives when they are installing a drive. Another possibility is insufficient power for the number of drives, but you don't give any details for that so maybe that isn't a concern. I have also seen cases where a bad drive connected will make everything else not work well.

 

Yes, you will have to rebuild the disabled parity, after you get the hardware working right.

 

SMART for that disk indicates it is failing and shouldn't be used, but if you can get it to work with everything else maybe we can get something off of it. If the disk won't mount with Unassigned Devices, then obviously it can't be shared. But it might be possible to repair its filesystem and then get it to mount.

 

Or maybe try that other software Squid mentioned and connect it to your PC with a USB dock of some sort.

Good point.  I actually rechecked all the connections after rebooting.  I've got to believe the power is fine since it has done ok for so many years.  The PSU is a ThermalTake 430W model and there are only six SATA drives and one SSD for the cache.  Other than a SATA controller card plugged in, that is it so I've got to believe 430W is plenty.  

 

Yea, I think I tried the file system repairs some time ago and didn't get anywhere.  Squid's recommendation does have me thinking I might try it.  I do have a Windows Desktop I could slave it up to.  I know this is going to seem ignorant, but I would have never thought a Windows-based data recovery application would have a chance of picking up data on Unraid, but I know Squid knows his stuff.  I might just test it out and see.

 

As of right now the parity is checking for validity and I think it will pass just fine.  I have no clue why having that one drive plugged in makes the sata controller act wonky and not always pickup the JBOD drives.  I think it might be worth just purchasing a new sata controller card as well.  This one has got to be pretty old.    

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Just a quick update on what I've done recently.  My hope is I can mark this post as SOLVED soon.

 

Squid's recommendation to try data recovery software totally surprised me.  I installed on a somewhat old PC I had since I could install the SATA drive directly to it.  I tried the Free Version of the software and started a scan.  It was pulling up all kinds of files!  I really expected to get nothing.  Since I knew I probably would want to pull off multiple items, I stopped the scan, and paid for the Pro Version and redid the scan.  The scan would take about 5 hours to complete.

 

Now remember what I said earlier about this drive being connected to my unraid server seemed to make it go wonky?  When it was plugged in certain hard drives would not be recognized.  Since I've had it out everything has been perfectly stable and I've sort of stress tested it.  Well, guess what?  The PC I was attempting to do the data recovery from "blue screened."  Not once, but every time I tried the scan and I tried it in SAFE MODE.  It would take about an hour or so, but consistently happen and not complete the scan.  I'm beginning to think this drive is just concentrated evil and it destroys everything in its path.   

 

As I said, this was an older PC so I guess there could be something wrong with it and it could be coincidence so I'm going to try one last thing and I'm not even sure if this will work, but I've purchased two different SATA to USB docks.  I'm going to try and slave the drive to my personal PC, which is a current laptop.  I'm not sure if the software will recognize the drive with these docks, but I thought it was worth a try.  It should be here tomorrow.  I'll provide an update then.

 

Thanks again for the help.   

Edited by JP
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Well, lesson learned.  I think I put too much faith into what I could recover from this drive.  First, I took out an old Desktop I had and put the EASEUS Recovery Software on it that Squid recommended.  I slaved up the drive and I was shocked how quickly it was finding recoverable data.  However, the Desktop was old and after about 3 hours, it blue-screened.  This got me thinking I should move to a current stable laptop and leverage a SATA to USB connector.  EASEUS recommended almost any product so I waited for those to arrive.  I tried two different kinds and they both operated exceedingly slow so I thought it was probably the connection itself and that the recovery software preferred having a direct SATA connection.  So I reimaged the old Desktop with Windows 10, reinstalled the recovery software and tried again expecting it to find those files again quickly.  It hasn't.  I'm about 18 hours into a scan and it has found about 20 gigs.  At this rate it will probably take about 2 months to finish and I suspect the end result isn't going to be good.

 

What I should have done instead is ensured the Desktop PC was stable first and give the unstable HDD one chance to recover the data, its optimal chance.  I think by attempting the scan more than once, I just invited more damage to the drive and now it is really toast.  I don't expect to run into this in the future, but if I do, at least I'll know a better way to approach it.  

 

So for now I'm going to mark this post as SOLVED.  I'm going to let the scan continue for a couple more days and check its progress.  If it still moves this slowly then I'll just throw the drive away and move on.  Thanks again for the help.

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Success!  I can't believe my dumb luck.  After two days of scanning and getting tech support to try and assist me, the failed data hdd was fully confirmed as toast.  There were so many bad sectors on it, it just couldn't be read.  I will say EaseUS support was great and they did try to help.  I was pretty bummed out and I still don't know why my backup missed this single file, but the file I was hunting down was the birth of my daughter from 12 years ago.    

 

Then, since I had already paid for the EaseUS Data Recovery License, I started thinking if I had kept any other hard drives around that I could scan and possibly get something off of them.  In my closet I found two failed drives from my unraid server, one from 11 years ago and the other from 10 years ago.  I was pretty shocked to find that they both could be scanned just fine.  I started looking through hundreds of files.  I don't know if all Data Recovery software is like this, but the one thing that is a bit of struggle is that the recovered files are basically lumped together based on their extensions and not what they were actually named.  This does help narrow it down, but hunting through hundreds of MP4 or MKV files can get tedious.

 

Ultimately, I couldn't believe it, but I stumbled on the video from one of these incredibly old hard drives.  I recovered it, got it back to the proper unraid folder, and put it to my backup again.  Still shocked that I found it.  Thanks again to all the help here.  I sincerely appreciate it.  

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11 hours ago, JP said:

In my closet I found two failed drives from my unraid server,

Odds are they were red balled but not because they failed. Unraid kicks the drive out whenever a write to the drive fails, whether or not the drive was at fault. It could have been the controller or the cable as well.

 

Regardless, you secured a win for packrats everywhere. 🙂

 

Congratulations on your accidental unintentional backup strategy paying off!

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1 hour ago, jonathanm said:

Odds are they were red balled but not because they failed. Unraid kicks the drive out whenever a write to the drive fails, whether or not the drive was at fault. It could have been the controller or the cable as well.

12 hours ago, JP said:

I don't know if all Data Recovery software is like this, but the one thing that is a bit of struggle is that the recovered files are basically lumped together based on their extensions and not what they were actually named.

Possibly you wouldn't even have needed data recovery software for those disks. You might have been able to just mount them with Unassigned Devices and read their files directly with their names intact. It is only if the files were deleted or corrupted that the filenames are likely to be lost.

 

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On 4/4/2020 at 11:19 AM, trurl said:

Possibly you wouldn't even have needed data recovery software for those disks. You might have been able to just mount them with Unassigned Devices and read their files directly with their names intact. It is only if the files were deleted or corrupted that the filenames are likely to be lost.

 

 

Good point.  I did try this with the first drive in question, but it would not mount at all.  EaseUS's data recovery software was able to pick up the data on the first scan without a problem, but eventually that machine blue-screened so I had to redo the scan.  The scanning in this case was evidently causing more damage because after that first scan it was completely unreadable and toast.  Now the two other drives I had were able to be scanned and I suspect if I put them in Unassigned Devices now, they could probably be read.  Ultimately, these are great tools for me to have in the future should I run into this again, but I'm certainly not hoping for that. :)  Thanks again.

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36 minutes ago, JP said:

The scanning in this case was evidently causing more damage because after that first scan it was completely unreadable and toast. 

The drive was toast to begin with.  that software doesn't make any changes / writes to the drive at all so as to not impede the recovery process.

 

Last time I had to use the software (was on an NTFS drive), it picked up a ton of stuff on it's first quick scan.  IIRC, it's more indepth scan was going to take a few days to complete, (and on the el-cheapo laptop I was using it on would also crash / bluescreen running it)so I just said whatever and grabbed what was on the quick scan.  If there was a file or two missing on the first I'd probably never notice, and I was simply glad to get the vast majority of files back.  When you're in a situation when you need to use recovery software, the odds are always going to be against you in recovering everything 100% with no missing / corrupted files.  

 

I suppose this is the difference between paying ~$100 for a piece of software or thousands to a data recovery company.

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