I screwed up my drives (?)

[MrBenedict]

Hello all,

I can't say how much I need your help.

Situation:
I've got 3x 2TB drives. they are all from type GPT.
(I think thats because as I run them on a Windows Server I've created 2 Partitions over all 3 drives)

However, I decided to install FreeNAS on a SSD which worked great.
Then the wizard asked me to create a storage pool. I called him a name and selected the "automatic" option.
I was not really thinking about what I am doing. In that moment, the "...working..."-Windows appeared I was like "WTF?? did he format all my drives??" So I canceled the operation with the X. It was running about 4-5seks.
You dont have to tell me how stupid this way of doing it was, I already learned the lesson :-((

But guys, now I need your help because I have no clue.
As I detached the SSD with FreeNAS and was full of hope that the windows Server boots up again...but...nope.
What I end up with was: this is a nas data disk and cannot boot system system halted windows

So I tried to access my drives directly via my windows10 dekstop, but not possible. They appear in drivemmgt but I cant assign them a drive letter or sth. else. And I dont want to simple convert it to an MBR because I dont know if my data gets lost or not.


Do you have any suggestions how to make my data accessible again?

 

[pirateghost]

My guess is that your data is gone. If it was valuable or important, restore from a backup or start shelling out some money to data recovery specialists. I HIGHLY doubt you will be able to recover from this yourself.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Hello all,

I can't say how much I need your help.

Situation:
I've got 3x 2TB drives. they are all from type GPT.
(I think thats because as I run them on a Windows Server I've created 2 Partitions over all 3 drives)

However, I decided to install FreeNAS on a SSD which worked great.
Then the wizard asked me to create a storage pool. I called him a name and selected the "automatic" option.
I was not really thinking about what I am doing. In that moment, the "...working..."-Windows appeared I was like "WTF?? did he format all my drives??" So I canceled the operation with the X. It was running about 4-5seks.
You dont have to tell me how stupid this way of doing it was, I already learned the lesson :-((

But guys, now I need your help because I have no clue.
As I detached the SSD with FreeNAS and was full of hope that the windows Server boots up again...but...nope.
What I end up with was: this is a nas data disk and cannot boot system system halted windows

So I tried to access my drives directly via my windows10 dekstop, but not possible. They appear in drivemmgt but I cant assign them a drive letter or sth. else. And I dont want to simple convert it to an MBR because I dont know if my data gets lost or not.


Do you have any suggestions how to make my data accessible again?

What did you expect was going to happen when you told or to create a zfs pool with your drives? I would have also thought it would prevent you from doing this on drives that are already formatted. Most people have issues wiping the drives and for some reason you didn't have anything stop you and it just worked.

 

[Starpulkka]

Wow are you really German? I only know 1 german person who speaks or writes english. Last time when i tryed to communicate German kids they really did not understand english or finnish at all. Only when i opened fire they got message to leave my property, and came back with 20 german people, and still no one did not understand english or finnish. But it's kind of understandable that german education is so poor these days.
But to your mess.
Fastest way to get data back is reimbuse from backup. Or other way is you make disk images from hdds and then if GPT is recovable from endside you recover GPT back from there. If GPT is lost 5s pokin a disk does not overwrite data from platter in spinning disk. And you can get data back by reconstructing files without GPT, by using some program that is designed to ntfs files.
But i have no idea what you mean by saying "created 2 Partitions over all 3 drives"
Have a nice day.


edit: well by creating a image i meant as an example, using ddrescue to make image from original hdd and you then can poke those images. Important thing is (if you dont have done recovery before) that you dont poke original hdd's.
And try first see if theres a backup GPT in disk image (dont poke original one), was it testdisk software (dont member anymore its 3 years when i last time had to repair ntfs), and try repair gpt by using that if no dice then you can use zfs snapshot to get hdd image to back to original state. Theres also a mount trick that you can try mount image a 60 or 400 sectors from start, and see does ntfs give it's files then.
Theres also another trick on u tube, that you only need edit some bits on ntfs start sectors so you then can use windows scandisk repair tool to get workin ntfs again. But as i said poke those images or clone copys what ever, but dont poke original hdd's.
Also i dont like those dynamic disk's stuff at all. windows installer or dos tools cant make heads or tails from dynamic disks. Theres a professional tools for those and its professional user starts xxxx€.
offtopic:
Lately i have been busy make 2 ssds to one, using that dynamic stuff (no dice on windows drive), also tryed raid card with tape pin 5,6 "trick" no dice. Next thing i might try custom windows.
Also intresting thing happened last night, i was using supermicro impiview and bam. windows bluescreened, restarted and then tryed again supermicro ipmiwiev, next thing java script started and security software shutdown, and windows uac and. And this will be last time when im going to use supermicro impiview.

 

[MrBenedict]

Wow are you really German? I only know 1 german person who speaks or writes english. Last time when i tryed to communicate German kids they really did not understand english or finnish at all. Only when i opened fire they got message to leave my property, and came back with 20 german people, and still no one did not understand english or finnish. But its kind of understandable that german education is so poor these days.

hahaha :-D Had a big laugh on that, but not all germans are bad (!)
of course there is no real backup of that data. -.-* so I am not able to restore data from there. I was too stingy to spend money for additional storage to make backups...in this case the worst german habit I can have....
So you mean, I should create images of every single HDD....copy them to another HDD and try to access the data? I dont understand what you mean by recovering from endside? Maybe there is a tutorial somewhere that describes what you mean?
What makes me a very very bit kind of relaxing is, that my recovery software Kroll Ontrack is able to analyze and to recover data genereally. So I definately think too, that my complete data cant be overwritten in like 5seks.
Right now I started a data analysis...lets see what we end up with. At the moment its telling me "unknown block type" but at least there seems to be data on the drive.

What I mean by "2 partitions over all 3 drives" is that I converted -I think 3 of 3 drives in to dynamic ones.
So in the end I got 2 partitions with all the physically space of the 3 drives.
I dont know if this explanation is more confusing then helpfull.

anyway big thanks Starpulkka for your constructive answer!

 

[joeschmuck]

The first question you need to ask yourself is: "Is the data that important to me that I'm willing to spend days or weeks trying to figure out how to recover it OR pay a company to recover it?" If the answer is yes, as @Starpulkka said, crate an image (for me I would use Acronis and create a sector by sector backup) with software of your choice before trying to recover your data and possibly making things worse. If it isn't worth spending a week to learn how to recover some of your files or pay some to attempt it for you (with no guarantee of success), then I'd cut my losses and just rebuild the server from scratch.

There are tools out there to attempt manual recovery of NTFS formatted files and you know, I haven't done file recover in literally decades, it was a pain back then but I'm sure there are better tools available today.

Good Luck if you try to recover your data.

 

[MrBenedict]

ok thank you.
Today I ordered the seagate 8TB archive drive.
My plan is to spend time in recovering the data, hopefully it is worth it.
So keep fingers crossed :)

 

[Scharbag]

Yikes.

Backups are the bomb.

 

[MrBenedict]

Short term update on this:

I was able to use some 3rd party tools to recover some data of one drive.
As this happened I recognized, that all 3 drives were formatted as FreeBSD ZFS. (I guess still with all my data on it)

So going through this horror of "recovery" I've got a new question to you:

Is it possible to convert the ZFS formatted drive back into a NTFS without losing data?

PS. what I going to try now is to access the ZFS drives via a Linux VM...


greetz

 

[pirateghost]

No, you can't convert filesystems from zfs to NTFS without losing data.

I'm curious what recovery tool gets data from a zfs disk...especially when they are raided together using zfs.

 

[depasseg]

I'm curious what recovery tool gets data from a zfs disk...especially when they are raided together using zfs.

My guess is that it was able to see the raw NTFS file data on the drives that existed prior to being formatted as ZFS.

 

[joeschmuck]

This one has my curiosity as well.

 

[Mirfster]

Is it possible to convert the ZFS formatted drive back into a NTFS without losing data?

Don't think so, but it "may" be possible to have a system that is able to read the NTFS data on those drives and copy them to another drive that is properly formatted in NTFS. Trick to it may be to have the donor NTFS drive shared out on another system.

All hypothetically speaking of course...

 

[MrBenedict]

Hi guys,

news from the other side. ^^
I was able to manage my data with partitionguru. I first tried to recover "lost partitions" After that finished and took me like 40hrs of time, I am now starting recovering lost files".
Till now, it looks like nearly all my data was found by partitionguru. It takes me one more drive to be scanned. I had a look on some files, and they look good and coherent.
As my copy to the new 8TB drive started and successfully finished this thread could be announced as "solved".

 

[joeschmuck]

So you were able to recover some of your data? That is remarkable and I hope the data is valid.

 

[MrBenedict]

Sooooo...finally....I finished.
It took me way longer than expected but the result is even better than I thought it would be.

First of all, if you ever facing issues like formated or lost partitions / files...partitionguru from eassos is the way to make things work again.
Even as a trial user the customer support is great and is willing to help you.
Overall I was able to recover about 85% of my 3x 2TB drives that I accidentally formated to a FreeBSD ZFS.

15% of it was corrupted or simply lost data.
At the end I get off lightly.

Thanks for all !


greetz

 

[SirMaster]

I'm not sure why any of you guys are surprised he could easily recover most of the data with free tools.

As he said, FreeNAS ran for only a few seconds on his disks.

All that did was create a new GPT on the disks and 2 partitions, and write a little zfs metadata. Not even 1MB of data probably.

All his NTFS data is still on the disks and is pretty simple to have a recovery tool scan for and rebuild an index of it. It takes many, many hours to wipe out all the actual data. You have to actually overwrite it all. A quick format to a new filesystem generally does nothing to the actual data.

I've recovered lots of data from friends/family HDDs like this where the disk was formatted and always got like 90some% of it back.