Geneuine - 30 Euros to anyone that can recover my harddrive!

  • Hi there.


    Something catastrophic has just happened on my hard drive, when trying to change caddies and it is now not being recognized by Linux.


    The drive is 14TB and formatted as ext4.


    I am running Puppy Linux and whenever I plug the hard drive in, it is not recognized - i.e. cannot be mounted.


    Most of the information on there is replacable but there are a few things that I do not think I have backed up (i.e. a few photos of someone that has since passed away).


    If anyone can get it working again I would be more than happy to pay them 30 Euros for their help!


    Thanks in advance.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    If anything is really valuable on that drive, it would behoove you to stop messing with it, and take it to a true data recovery specialist. The more you mess with it, the more you risk not being able to retrieve the data.


    Unfortunately, that's going to cost you significantly more than 30 euros.


    Then learn the 3-2-1 method of important data backup (I always say "One is none, Two is one")

  • It is a little sad to hear you can not get your data out. Before thinking of any actions, can I ask a little more details on the problem


    1) You were running Puppy Linux before changing the caddy for that disk?

    2) "Now not being recognized by Linux" meant the same Puppy Linux you are running?

    3) Have you tried to plug the drive in to a different machine?

    4) What can you see when plugging the drive into the box and boot with a live CD/DVD such as Linux Mint? Can use Disks to check.

  • Have you tried a # fdisk -l on the console? Is your hard disk listed?


    Maybe you can give SystemRescue a chance and check the hard drive. Download the SystemRescue ISO, put it in a USB stick and boot your device. The SystemRescue distribution has a lot of utilities and tools to help repair and recover data from Linux.

  • Thanks everyone.


    What I did was pretty stupid.


    I took my hard drive out of a OMV server and tried to mount it to another OMV server but pressed initialise instead of mount.


    It started to wipe the hard drive and it took me a good six seconds before I was able to turn off the caddy.


    I am currently having a go with Testdisk - am just running analyse on the disk to see what it comes up with.

  • Keep your 30 euros, and put it towards a seat of UFS Explorer. (standard version would probably work for you if you are not dealing with RAIDs or want to go hex editing the drives)

    Tried and trusted data recovery software solutions
    UFS Explorer is sophisticated data recovery software that has proved to be efficient in numerous data loss cases of different complexity and on various systems
    www.ufsexplorer.com


    I have managed to get data off drives with it before, when nothing could read them.


    The biggest issue is if the drive index/FAT/MFT/etc. (name varies based on file system) is destroyed completely, as in overwritten and not just deleted. If it's overwritten, you just have big pile of 1's and 0's with no direction on what belongs to what file.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    You failed to mention that before... Did the drive completely erase?.. At the very least I'm assuming the filesystem got wrecked.


    Assuming the filesystem was ext2/3/4... have you looked at extundelete? I'v enever used iit but I've saw it recommended here a few times.


    extundelete: An ext3 and ext4 file undeletion utility

  • You failed to mention that before... Did the drive completely erase?.. At the very least I'm assuming the filesystem got wrecked.


    Assuming the filesystem was ext2/3/4... have you looked at extundelete? I'v enever used iit but I've saw it recommended here a few times.


    https://extundelete.sourceforge.net/

    Sorry - should have clarified.


    The disk did not fully erase.


    It start initiating and I immediately pulled the plug as fast I could.


    The disk is 14TB in size and whilst I had 12TB used up, most of this is recordings - only about 1TB is valuable to me.


    I am hoping that the 1TB part is still salvageable.


    What do you think I should do?


    I have been running Testdisk and it is taking absolutely ages, given the size of the disk (only 2% after a couple of hours).


    Should I let it do its thing or cancel it and use one of the other options mentioned above?

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Again, filesystem/data recovery isn't really my thing.. but I don't see what TestDisk is going to do.. it's a test, not a recovery tool.


    Like I said, I've never used it, but I've seen extundelete mentioned as a recovery tool for ext* filesystems on this forum a lot over the years.


    From your OP I was under the impression the drive had physically failed.

  • From the testdisk homepage (https://www.cgsecurity.org)

    Data recovery

    Testdisklogo clear 100.png If you have lost partition or strange problem with your hard disk partitions, run TestDisk to recover your data. TestDisk detects numerous filesystem including NTFS, FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, exFAT, ext2, ext3, ext4, btrfs, BeFS, CramFS, HFS, JFS, Linux Raid, Linux Swap, LVM, LVM2, NSS, ReiserFS, UFS, XFS



    It IS a recovery tool.

    And I had used it successfully for NTFS data recovery from a faulty harddrive.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I've successfully used testdisk/photorec (same package) and extundelete many, many times.

    Should I let it do its thing or cancel it and use one of the other options mentioned above?

    let it run.

    omv 7.0.4-2 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.10 | compose 7.1.2 | k8s 7.0-6 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


    Please try ctrl-shift-R and read this before posting a question.

    Please put your OMV system details in your signature.
    Please don't PM for support... Too many PMs!

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Going to take at least a day as it pretty slow progress.

    I had a photographer friend need files recovered. photorec ran for almost a week.

    omv 7.0.4-2 sandworm | 64 bit | 6.5 proxmox kernel

    plugins :: omvextrasorg 7.0 | kvm 7.0.10 | compose 7.1.2 | k8s 7.0-6 | cputemp 7.0 | mergerfs 7.0.3


    omv-extras.org plugins source code and issue tracker - github


    Please try ctrl-shift-R and read this before posting a question.

    Please put your OMV system details in your signature.
    Please don't PM for support... Too many PMs!

  • I had a photographer friend need files recovered. photorec ran for almost a week.

    That is mad.


    I bet the anticipation was unbearable!


    At least I can now come to terms with the fact that I have majorly messed up and to set up a decent backup plan as soon I know the damage.


    Slightly ironically, the only reason I messed about with the harddrive was to use it as a backup in the first place - very irritating.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    Just another quick question if that is OK (was doing lots of research, last night).


    1. What is the difference between gdisk and fsck?

    2. Is this piece of freeware Free data recovery software download (r-studio.com), similar?

    Please consider going to a professional data recory service if your data is important to you. IMO you are making it more worse if you try to solve the problem on your own. At the end your data is not recoverable anymore.

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