RAID 0 mistake. Recovery possible?

[Alex Gerulaitis]

Acronis Disk Director may help

https://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/

“Acronis Recovery Expert is a highly reliable data partition and disk recovery tool that prepares you to tackle and repair the results of a personal error, hardware or software failure, virus attack or hacker’s intrusive destruction, fast.”

They have a free trial – see if it works.

There are also EASEUS Partition Recovery and “Find & Mount”

Do not do any destructive steps until you are shown a folder structure. 🙂

Good luck.

Alex (DV411)

[David Roth weiss]

Forget it Trevor, it’s toast now. Anytime you push the button to create a RAID you’re changing the most basic track structure of the drives and wiping our the drive directory. You can try to dink around with all you want, but the odds are very much against you recovering anything.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[David Roth Weiss] “Forget it Trevor, it’s toast now.”

Not so fast David! 🙂

Erasing a file usually means setting a bit in the file allocation table to tell the OS that it’s been deleted. Until something is written in its place (or in the FAT’s record of it), the data is perfectly recoverable.

Same with partitions – marking the drive part of an array most likely wiped out the partition table; it should still be recoverable if the volume hasn’t been striped or formatted.

Alex (DV411)

[Trevor Armstrong]

Thanks for the prompt reply gentlemen!

I’ll give disk director a go when I get home from work. I plan on installing Windows 7 on the raptor raid 0 set, installing disk director, and seeing if it can work its magic on the 2TB drive that is (now) correctly connected directly into the motherboard – not the raid controller (doh!).

Thanks again, I shall keep you posted

-Trevor

[Alex Gerulaitis]

Don’t connect or power up the 2TB drive until Win7 is installed. Theoretically, nothing bad should happen to it during Win7 installation but I am seriously superstitious. 🙂

Alex (DV411)

[David Roth weiss]

[Alex Gerulaitis] “Not so fast David! 🙂

Erasing a file usually means setting a bit in the file allocation table to tell the OS that it’s been deleted. Until something is written in its place (or in the FAT’s record of it), the data is perfectly recoverable.”

trust me, I would love to be wrong in this case, and I sincerely hope that Trevor is able to resurrect everything he needs.

Good luck to you Trevor, I’m pulling for you.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Ben Griggs]

Have you gotten this taken care of?

I’ve seen it happen, and as long as you haven’t actually written data to the disk all the information is still there (but not)

Creating a RAID array generally doesn’t zero out the drives, that would take a while for a drive that size, you’d notice. It just changes the master boot record, MBR, and that can be repaired by windows usually.

You can jump to using Acronis (not free). It’s probably the safest route, you’ll get everything. But you need equal size storage to write the recovered data to and be prepared to wait for ages while it rebuilds.

What can prevent Windows from automatically repairing the MBR in this case, is if your bios and the MBR conflict about being RAID. So try switching from RAID to IDE in your BIOS and see if Windows wants to actually be useful!. Chances are you’ll have your data back real quick.

GL,
Ben

[Trevor Armstrong]

Gentlemen, thank you all so much. With help from you and other forums, I was able to get 100% of my data back from the drive! I used TestDisk which worked like a charm (loaded through PartedMagic off of UBCD). My eyes lit up when I saw all of my directories show up on the disk while in TestDisk. It was a great moment.

Thank you so much. I most certainly will leave the 2tb drive disconnected while getting my raid0 set up – this time.

Anyone else trying to retreive data in a similar fashion can certainly email me for the steps that I took in my case.

cheers

[David Roth weiss]

[Trevor armstrong] ” I was able to get 100% of my data back from the drive! “

Congrats!!! I’m really happy for you Trevor and happy I was dead wrong. I wish I had the same luck as you in the past when I was a Windows person, but alas, that was not the case.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Bob Zelin]

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I am in shock – I never heard of this utility (and it’s free !), and I would have bet money that it would NOT have worked.

Great tip !

Bob Zelin