Data Recovery

[matt.trower918]

Hi everyone. I'm fairly confident now that ive had some practice with freenas. However when i first started i didnt realize that when creating a pool it would format my hard drive. I have a 3tb hard drive that now needs to be recovered. Ive researched for months now and still cant find a solution. Any suggestions? Programs? A Reset Switch? Lol. Thanks in advance.

 

[Redcoat]

that now needs to be recovered.

Can you give more detail of your expected "recovery"? You want to recover data from the drive, make the drive available for another use, whatever?

 

[Chris Moore]

The OP appears to be saying that there was a drive filled with data that got reformatted by FreeNAS and now he wants that data back.

 

[kdragon75]

Depending on the data a program like photorec can be used to scan the drive for intact files. You will lose all file names and folder paths but I have used this to recover data from damaged NTFS, exFAT, and HFS file systems.

 

[Redcoat]

The OP appears to be saying that there was a drive filled with data that got reformatted by FreeNAS and now he wants that data back.

Hmmm... I'd have to start research from scratch if I were facing that issue. I thought he might "just" have been experiencing problems with the partitioning when trying to switch the HDD back into a Windoze box...

 

[SweetAndLow]

Freenas doesn't just format drives. There are threads here of people who can't create a pool because freenas won't nuke their old drive. So the OP had to have gone out of his way to delete everything. There is basically zero chance of getting this data back.

 

[kdragon75]

Freenas doesn't just format drives. There are threads here of people who can't create a pool because freenas won't nuke their old drive. So the OP had to have gone out of his way to delete everything. There is basically zero chance of getting this data back.

Only true if every block is over written. The wipe drive function will do that but if he formated the drive with ZFS any other way he has a chance to recover data.

 

[matt.trower918]

my apologies everyone. ive been crazy busy. my goal is to have my files (Music, movies, applications, programs, etc.) accessible again. file names are the least of my worries at this point. i am trying to recover a 3tb hdd with only one ntfs partition. now it is raw. i dont have another drive with the space to save any files if they are recovered. im requesting information on data recovery software that can fix (rebuild, unformat, undelete) the partition as a whole. i prefer a program that doesnt require another source to save everything to. i want to recover my hard drive with nothing more than a program and my computer. thanks for the help everyone.

 

[kdragon75]

im requesting information on data recovery software that can fix (rebuild, unformat, undelete) the partition as a whole

Then you screwed. The file system is GONE you wrote data OVER the parts that say where everything is. It is virtually impossible to recover from and to the same disk. Where do you save the data? What if there already data that needs to be recovered there?
Unless you going to pay several hundred/thousands of dollars, something like photorec and a second drive are you best option. Also STOP DOING ANYTHING ELSE WITH THE DISK! Every time you change ANYTHING on it, you're potentially further destroying more data!

 

[kdragon75]

There is no such thing as a magic unformat or rebuild if data has been destroyed like in the case of formatting to another filesystem.

 

[kdragon75]

Now go look at a second drive and photorec. Lesson learned?

 

[AlexGG]

im requesting information on data recovery software that can fix (rebuild, unformat, undelete) the partition as a whole. i prefer a program that doesnt require another source to save everything to. i want to recover my hard drive with nothing more than a program and my computer. thanks for the help everyone.

Given the damage, you aren't likely to avoid copying everything to another location.

If you have a blank hard drive, R-Explorer, RecliaMe, or R-Studio are all good for NTFS. The recovery of NTFS is pretty well researched, so any of these three will give you what's possible.

The quality of the recovery depends on how much data you wrote to the ZFS pool, and, consequently, to the drive, while it was used in FreeNAS, and also on which specific locations on the drive were overwritten.

 

[otpi]

You can maybe try recuva. Linus just did a test https://youtu.be/Ls0fdUr885E

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_recovery#List_of_data_recovery_software