Broke a mirror, used disks individually, computer died, now can't access either disk

How to use TestDisk to recover lost partition
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ResultsWereNil
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Joined: 13 Jul 2016, 06:28

Broke a mirror, used disks individually, computer died, now can't access either disk

#1 Post by ResultsWereNil »

I had a mirror using 2 x 1TB disks for all of my data (20 years worth) in a Win7 machine. I ran out of room, so I broke the mirror and started using the disks individually (since they hadn't died in 5 years, I thought they'd be fine).

Well, the rest of the computer died, so I took out the disks and tried accessing them from my new Win7 build. No dice. Went online and found out that the reason (supposedly) that I could not access them is because they were dynamic and showed as "invalid."

So, I went online and found HxD which told me to change one of the parameters from 42 to 07, which I did.

Now the disks present as Healthy, Active, and Primary, but they are also "RAW" and show 0 bytes in Properties (I know that data is on there somewhere, because I haven't formatted or erased anything yet).

How can I get my data with TestDisk? I tried running an analysis but no joy. What next??

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cgrenier
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Re: Broke a mirror, used disks individually, computer died, now can't access either disk

#2 Post by cgrenier »

It may be better to change the partition id back to 42. After a reboot, try to "import" the foreign disks.
You may need a Windows 7 Pro, not a Home edition.

Iceking007
Posts: 15
Joined: 30 Nov 2012, 19:09

Re: Broke a mirror, used disks individually, computer died, now can't access either disk

#3 Post by Iceking007 »

Have you been using the disks 'separately' for long? If the mirrored data on one disk is mostly complete keep that one for your backup and use one disk to test. It might have been better to remove one array disk and replace it with a larger disk, this would allow the active controller to rebuild the array as it was designed and you could then replace the primary disk with a larger one giving you the space you need with the redundancy/speed (however hind sight is always 20/20, perhaps you'll find a way to do that now).

When you say the original system died, could you borrow some components to get it working? If you upgraded chances are the drive controllers are different and might not read the disk the same, as I am aware it is generally best to troubleshoot in the failed condition rather than to change everything and hope for the best. Even if you can just access your information at least you can copy it off. Even simply changing operating system affects how the disk is interpreted, try at least to mimic as many of the functional conditions as possible if you can't use your old system (sometimes 'newer' isn't always 'better').

Hope that helps, good luck.

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