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GPT raid array swon as RAW

Posted: 28 Feb 2016, 02:54
by joebloggs
Hello,

I'm currently trying to recover from what I believe is partitioning issue on my raid drive. Two WD 4TB drives running as raid1, visible under Win7 64b as MARVEL Raid VD. I had two NTFS partitions 1TB and 3TB. This is not my C drive.

Wednesday morning after boot I noticed that 1TB partition is gone - windows disk management saw it as RAW. I did a backup of 3TB partition that was fully available at that time. In the meantime it occurs that last two backups on my 1TB partition stored on a separate NAS are corrupted and unusable. So since Wednesday I'm trying to recover from that. So far no luck.

I tried TestDisk 7.1-WIP and 7.0. The EFI GPT is recognized after a disk selection. Also - Analyse can see basically correct (as far as I understand) partition structure - no overlaps, size in sectors is matching my 1TB / 3TB split. However - information about errors are displayed for every partition:

Image

The advanced menu got no boot button, no matter which partition I highlight:

Image

The Boot option is available on different drives - that is including one GPT 4TB WD....

The 'Quick search' after a few days of running found a massive number of partitions (log file is 380kB big), most of them are called [NO NAME], some [EFISECTOR], a few [Boot]. Which is a bit strange, as both drives were bought new from Amazon and used only for this RAID.
Anyway - I checked those partitions and none of them is displaying my files I'm looking for - some have some files, but that is not my stuff. None of the found partitions got names I gave them originally. And size vary - from a few MB to a couple of GB. Nothing close to 1TB....

At the moment I finally got additional bigger drive so I'm doing image of my beloved partition 1TB. I also managed to recover massive number of files with PhotoRec - unstructured as you can imagine.
In the meantime the 3TB partition after one reboot also switched to RAW.

So to be honest I actually ran out of ideas what I can do next to recover from this.... I will run Quick scan and then maybe Deep, but that will take maybe a week. Any hints will be much appreciated. Thank you.

Re: GPT raid array swon as RAW

Posted: 28 Feb 2016, 09:18
by cgrenier
In the Advanced menu, for each MS Data partition, choose Type, confirm MS Data, force the type to NTFS, Boot, RebuildBS, List. If you can see your files, choose Write, confirm, Quit.
If it doesn't work, please post the testdisk.log file content.

Re: GPT raid array swon as RAW

Posted: 28 Feb 2016, 12:34
by joebloggs
Thank you.

On the 3TB partition (the one I got data backed up anyway) the rebuild was nearly immediate - I was able to list correct files so as you suggested - I selected [write]. On the troubled partition after selecting RebuildBS the 'Search mft' appeared and is currently running. I will let you know once it complete

Image

Re: GPT raid array swon as RAW

Posted: 28 Feb 2016, 18:21
by joebloggs
Unfortunately the MFT search and BS Rebuild failed :(
It came back to this screen. List it not working. I executed it twice. No luck.
Log attached.

Image

Re: GPT raid array swon as RAW

Posted: 01 Mar 2016, 12:42
by joebloggs
Hello. Do you have any suggestions about any further steps after RebuildBS failed bacause MFT seems to be corrupted?

How it is likely it could be a windows driver issue? This is the only hardware raid I have on this PC. I got another 4TB WD drive, and it is working fine. But that is a standalone sata drive and has been plugged in after the crash. Was wondering - maybe I can try to boot from live linux cd and attempt to mount it? Alternatively - powerdown PC, unplug one of the RAID discs, connect to the linux machine. That was RAID1 - will such drive will be recognizable on a separate machine via usb docking station? Or via sata directly?

At the moment I created an image of this corrupted partition and trying to recover as many files as possible.Considering paying external company to recover data if I will not be happy with amount and / or quality of data recovered by myself, but that is the very last resort.

Re: GPT raid array swon as RAW

Posted: 02 Mar 2016, 14:42
by cgrenier
Please run PhotoRec on the partition 2 or 3, choose [Whole], not [Free]. In FileOpts, you may want to disable txt and tx? file families. Does PhotoRec recover
- valid files or
- only junk and short valid files ?

Re: GPT raid array swon as RAW

Posted: 02 Mar 2016, 15:26
by joebloggs
PhotoRec was able to recover a massive number of files from this 1TB partition. There is a lot of valid files, including images, zips, pdfs among them.