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Hey, SH/SC! I've got a bit of a problem and it would mean the world to me if someone could point me in the right direction. I've got a RAID 1 array with two 1TB disks in it, and the combined disk was accidentally repartitioned- with lots of data on it. Most of it's not important and can be replaced, but there's a few things in it (specifically source code) that I can't. My only resort would be to use an older backup and rewrite big parts of my program, which I obviously want to avoid. What specifically happened is that I was installing Windows 7 to another disk on the machine, and accidentally deleted the NTFS partition on the 1TB RAID1 disk. It marked the start of the disk with a 100MB "System Reserved" partition and the rest as Free Space. I assume the System Reserved was formatted, but I did not specifically format the rest. Is there some software I can use to recover some files from this disk and get my code back? It's in multiple places on the disk, in various forms (backup RARs, previous development snapshots, so forth.) Of course, in the future I'll be keeping duplicates of this on another disk. Somewhat ironically, I had it on a RAID1 disk to make sure the data didn't get lost. I don't mind paying for software to do the recovery myself, but I'd rather not send the disk to a recovery service (as this would take a lot longer than rewriting the code myself- as much as I do not want to do that.) If it helps, the disks are both Western Digital 7200RPM SATA disks, neither is an SSD, and I am using the motherboard (ASrock, model upon request)'s onboard RAID capability. Thanks very much for any help! EDIT: I also apologize if this belongs more in Haus of Tech Support.
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# ? Jun 18, 2015 20:17 |
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# ? May 6, 2024 02:49 |
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I've used http://www.active-undelete.com/ with success in situations like this.
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# ? Jun 19, 2015 04:33 |
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Take a look at TestDisk, but it's not for the faint of heart.
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# ? Jun 19, 2015 04:44 |
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Thanks- I will put an image on another disk and try both .. I don't want to risk anything!
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# ? Jun 19, 2015 05:07 |
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Oh god, this brings back memories of me trying to install some crap linux and accidentally formatting. I just had like a pile of 16gb, and 2gb SD cards and old hard drives I still had for some reason, just to recover the data somewhere. Anyway, just make sure you don't run or install anything on the affected hard drive and you should be hunky dory. A reformat usually will just mark all the data as overwritable, so it should still be fine as long as you don't use the hard drive at all until everything's recovered.
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# ? Jun 20, 2015 11:58 |
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I got a tip from a friend who works in IT to give Recuva a try, since it's free and can supposedly recover files from disks without partitions. However it seems to insist the disk be mounted anyway from within windows. I set the area I'm trying to recover from (about 900 GB) as NTFS like it used to be and let windows do a quick format so I could do a "Deep scan" with recuva, since from what I've read/been told formatting pretty much only marks the space as reusable. Looks like it's going to take a long time to scan the area, though. Hopefully I'm on the right track? Or am I not using Recuva in the right way? Thanks.
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# ? Jun 23, 2015 06:57 |
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A deep scan could take days so that sounds plausible.
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# ? Jun 24, 2015 03:24 |
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Ftk imager is free and will do what it sounds like you want. Basically you'd take an image of your drive, then use ftk to open it and start digging around in the slack space for your files. It's definitely more labor intensive at first (you'll have to learn how to use it) but after that you'll easily be able to dig around in pretty much anything you can get an image of.
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# ? Jun 24, 2015 04:45 |
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# ? May 6, 2024 02:49 |
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No idea about raid but I've used TestDisk for this before - it looks for actual partitions and fixes the table that describes them on the disk, so it's basically undoing the partition deletion by putting the entry back. You don't need to mess around crawling through the disk analysing it for potential files, they haven't gone anywhere. If TestDisk works it's a fix that takes like a minute, and as far as I know it can't do any damage to the filesystem since it's just messing with partition info that you've lost right now anyway (I Am Not A Partition Pro) http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step That's the process, you can poke around and see what's going on in there without actually making any changes if you like
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# ? Jun 24, 2015 05:44 |