cgsecurity.org

After a recent power outage my external HDDs didn't get powered back up. Upon powering them back up the 18TB RAID was a little wonky to come back online. It didn't show up on the system so I went to Disk Manager to see what the issue might be. When Disk Manager loaded the drive showed up in the file explorer normally. I saw that all the folders were there and found a file I was looking for. I went back to Disk Manager and there was a popup and I clicked yes.... It was an initialize disk prompt.

After fighting off waves of nausea, the gravity of the situation started to settle in.

I thought maybe if I power it off and on again it will go away. It didn't.

Maybe if I re-boot it will come back as it was. It didn't.

I came across a post on super user about testdisk and I am currently running a Quick Search and it is analyzing cylinders. Not sure what that means, but it is going at about 1 cylinder/sec. At the current rate, it will take 25.33 days to get to 100%.

While I wait, I thought I might ask: What is the best course of action here?

Happy to make a donation when the dust settles and I have my data back. When the nausea stops.

Very slow disk is usually due to a disk with bad sectors. What kind of Raid do you have ?
If you have a Raid 0, you should either clone the raid (recommended) or clone individually each disk (at least the disk at the origin of the slowdown).
Raid1 or Raid5 should detect the disk in predictive failure and/or bad status and eject it from the Raid.

It is a Raid5. This is where I am at with it this morning.

Would it be better to do a quick format on the drive and then try to recover the files?

So Windows decided it needed to update and restart so I lost 24 hours of scanning. But, this time I selected the Intel/PC option and it is zipping right along with the scan!

In the worst case, you always try PhotoRec but don't format.
Big volume are usually using EFI GPT, not PC Intel partition table.

I couldn't figure out how to restore the partition, but I did copy over all the files to a new 10TB drive.

Wonderful software! Donation coming!