Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

Hi All,

Sorry that I've gone dark for so long. I had sent out the drives to be evaluated, and the diagnosis came back that it was a purely logical issue. No physical damage to the drive. Unfortunately, I was told that the data could not be recovered without developing custom software to piece the data back together. Considering the $10k price tag to do so, I had to decline. After long last, I was able to get in touch with somebody who could tell me what likely happened.

The WD30EZRX drives are 512e formatted. Since the storage space was created on windows 8.1, the logical sector size of the drives is also 512. When migrating to Windows 10, the storage space was functioning just as expected. However, Windows 10 does not support 512e. When performing maintenance/updates on the Windows Storage Spaces from Windows 10, I believe this is where the issue began. If I had to guess, I would say that Windows attempted to convert the drive to a 4096k sector size and failed miserably.

Currently, windows 10 ignores the drives as if they are not even connected.

I installed Windows 8 in hopes of a different result. Sure enough, Windows 8 recognizes that the drives are all part of a Windows Storage pool. Unfortunately, it sees the storage pool as an "unrecognized format" since Windows 10 Storage Spaces are not reverse compatible with Windows 8.

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In summary:
Windows 8 knows what's on the drives, but is incompatible with Win 10 Storage Spaces
No way to convert the storage spaces back to Windows 8 compatibility
Windows 10 ignores my drives altogether, doesn't support logical sector size


Does anybody know of a workaround to either get Windows 10 to recognize the advanced format drives, or perhaps get Windows 8 to recognize Windows 10 storage spaces? I'm not sure whether converting the sector sizes would help, but that may be my next step.

I have cloned all of my drives to VHDX files at this point to lessen the read/writes on the originals.

Does Windows 8.1 show any partition or empty space on the WSS? If yes, maybe it's worth making R-Studio scan it? As a last chance.

When the drives are plugged in to Windows 8, they have the MS reserved partitions and the Storage pool partition. The storage pool partition usually comes up as an unknown format (probably due to the incompatibility). It doesn't show that it has any free space.

One of the things I've noticed is that there are usually many "Recognized" partitions that are colored orange when I do scans in R-Studio. They tend to have mixed sets of files, but no single partition that has all the files in one place. No single recognized partition contains a full recollection of the files.

kingofheartsx44 wrote:One of the things I've noticed is that there are usually many "Recognized" partitions that are colored orange when I do scans in R-Studio. They tend to have mixed sets of files, but no single partition that has all the files in one place. No single recognized partition contains a full recollection of the files.

That's typically because the RAID isn't assembled properly. It's only finding chunks of the file tables, but not an entire working file system. Even though R-Studio is seeing the WSS pool, it's clear that it's no longer configured properly. The array will need to be reconstructed as a block array and settings determined manually.

Hi,

How would one reconstruct this for WSS?

Johno2518 wrote: ↑

Tue Aug 07, 2018 12:42 am

Hi,

How would one reconstruct this for WSS?

I think, by honest toil. That is, manually.