Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

If you can preview pictures well, you can recover them successfully, and have good chances that other files can be recovered, too.
Please, contact our techsupport with R-Studio freezes, they'll help to solve the problem. Please, provide a link to this topic.
Actually, they'll ask you to give them a snapshot of the file system and give it to our developers to see what's going wrong.

It found a lot of "partitions", many orange small ones. But there is a green one that has approx 7.25Tb in size, which sounds about right. I double clicked it and it started finding entries or something, stopped it as I wanted to check something else and despite stopping early I got some hits, amongst which the Pictures map.... and I could preview those pictures I tried!!

Ran the search again, but it got stuck after 27m, with 3m left to go according to counter. But there it froze and couldn't do anything but terminate the program What to do?
This happened before, when I hadn't finished the entire scan and got up the 7.25Tb partition and searched it as well.... Can I recover all that is shown in the list after stopping the search, if I stop it midway or so? If I can preview, does that mean I can recover?

Actually, the picture looks quite promising, as R-Studio has found some Ext file system data. Unrecognised sectors show the area where the sync stopped. I think, you'll be able to get the data from the synced area. But I can't be absolutely sure without seeing the actual data.
You may save the scan info before opening the recognized partition. Just right-click the virtual RAID after scanning and select Save scan info. Then, if something goes wrong, you'll simply load the scan info with no need to re-scan the RAID.
An you may test how correctly the parameters are detected by checking the RAID consistency: Checking RAID consistency.

Ok so it's still running, but I'm a tad concerned... initially scan was looking quite good, but when waking up and checking up on status I was met by the following scan info:



I indicated with some fancy paint work where the scan is currently at. So this seems to me like 2 drives are giving lots of stuff (i.e. the disk 2 and 4, the two that were intact), whereas the other 2 appear to hardly give anything One of those other two was formatted in my PC, the other was around 40% in on the resync process... might be that it's currently on the formatted disk and that the partially synced disk will give some more hits?

What do you think? My position is that if there IS a chance I might be able to salvage our pictures, or as many as possible, I do not want to throw away that chance (but like I mentioned previously, we're not going to use the services of a professional data recovery company for this, simply too expensive). But if by the looks of everything it's doomed, I rather stop wasting time and create the new RAID so I can start transferring stuff back again. Currently got stuff all over the place with various 500Gb external drives

Allright, was hardly moving at all, still at 8-ish Mb after 2 hours.... so did some more reading and downloaded ReClaiMe free raid recovery. It ran for some hours, then came up with the parameters; wasn't around when it was finished but I believe it reached 100% confidence well before it finished the scan. So that's positive, I guess...

Followed the instructions as given by ReClaiMe to transfer the parameters to R-Studio, but doing so didn't give me anything other than the VIrtual Raid 1 (i.e. nothing underneath it). Double-clicking it prompted me to run a scan on the volume, which is what I'm now doing. It seems to be finding quite a lot of stuff, but still has 1 day to go...
I actually started a run like this yesterday evening, but when I came back down this morning I accidentally stopped it due to the fact that the scan overview screen had disappeared; only saw the scan progress bar in the bottom of the screen (why is this? And how to get the overview with all the sectors/blocks back?). AFter I stopped it, I did have some entries underneath the Virtual raid 1; doubleclicked one and it started populating and loading, but it got stuck at some point and then the R-Studio froze completely. I hope this was because I didn't finish the scan?

Anyway, from reading some more, I'm worried that the prompt for the scan, and no file structure showing up after the ReClaiMe raid parameters were entered, indicates that the parameters are wrong? Or is this due to the fact that, in the end, my RAID was NOT functional anymore, due to only 2 of the 4 disks being fully intact?

It will be much faster, I believe. Depends on how data is damaged on the RAID.

Allright, so I finally managed to source some decent components so now I've got everything set up and have started Raid Parameters Detection. I hope I did it right, using RAID5 (Netgear X-Raid), Blocker order for: Left Synchronous (default setting).

It says 6.31Mb Processed. 61% Detection RAte.

Is this going to go all the way, i.e. 4x4Tb for the four drives? If so it's going to take until 2016 I reckon

What happens in case of power failure or shutdown, will I have to start from the beginning again or?

Cheers
//T

TePeL wrote:

Alt wrote:I recommend you to do the following:
1. Create a virtual RAID from all images/drives and try to find its parameters using the R-Studio: Finding RAID Parameters.
2. Scan the entire virtual RAID and see what can be found.
Scanning only one disk is useless, as the data indeed scattered across the disks.

Ok thanks, will give it a go when I'm back home. Need to borrow a PC with sufficient SATA ports first though... we're a "laptop-only" family nowadays

It did find some files and pictures in the initial phase of the scan, how is that possible then?

That may be possible if the files are less than the block size of the RAID.

TePeL wrote:I read somewhere about the necessity of having the disks in the same order when trying to rebuild in a PC, is that also important when using R-Studio and making a virtual RAID?

Yes, all RAID parameters, including the disk order, should be original for successful data recovery. You may use RAID parameter detection built into R-Studio to find those.

TePeL wrote:Should I use the drive which I removed the partitions from and the one that was partially synced as is, or should I first try to use R-Studio (or another suggested software) to recover whatever was on those drives before the erase/sync? If there are no real files but only fragmented data, I don't know if that would even be possible though...

You should use all disks from the RAID.

Alt wrote:I recommend you to do the following:
1. Create a virtual RAID from all images/drives and try to find its parameters using the R-Studio: Finding RAID Parameters.
2. Scan the entire virtual RAID and see what can be found.
Scanning only one disk is useless, as the data indeed scattered across the disks.

Ok thanks, will give it a go when I'm back home. Need to borrow a PC with sufficient SATA ports first though... we're a "laptop-only" family nowadays

It did find some files and pictures in the initial phase of the scan, how is that possible then?
I read somewhere about the necessity of having the disks in the same order when trying to rebuild in a PC, is that also important when using R-Studio and making a virtual RAID?

Should I use the drive which I removed the partitions from and the one that was partially synced as is, or should I first try to use R-Studio (or another suggested software) to recover whatever was on those drives before the erase/sync? If there are no real files but only fragmented data, I don't know if that would even be possible though...

I recommend you to do the following:
1. Create a virtual RAID from all images/drives and try to find its parameters using the R-Studio: Finding RAID Parameters.
2. Scan the entire virtual RAID and see what can be found.
Scanning only one disk is useless, as the data indeed scattered across the disks.