Hello While setting up a newly purchased RAID-capable hard disk cage I've damaged the contents of 2 hard disks and want to know if it is possible to recover.
The cage has 5 disk slots each occupied by 3TB hard disks. 4 of the disks came from an older cage by the same maker (TerraMaster, in case it matters) and one is new. In the old configuration I had 2 disks in a RAID 1 configuration and 2 as single disks. I transferred over the 4 disks from the old cage and added a new disk in the 5th slot. The new cage is RAID 1 capable in its first two slots and the remaining three are single disks. You've probably guessed what I did by now. I put the two single disks from the old cage into the first two slots of the cage and enabled RAID. I should have put the two disks that were RAID in the old cage in those slots. I realised almost immediately what I had done and swapped the disks around into the correct configuration. My originally-RAID pair are now correctly in the first two slots with RAID enabled and are none the worse for the experience of having briefly having been in the single slots. Unfortunately my two originally-single disks are showing up as having no partitions according to lsblk. There was data on those disks that I would ideally like to get back. Do I have any hope of undoing whatever damage was done to the disks when the cage was switched to RAID mode? I did not write any data to them, and crucially I did NOT create a new file system on the disks after turning on RAID in the cage before realising what I had done. A search turned up the gpart program but it looks ancient -- could it still help me? gparted may also help but most online info about it is about repartitioning disks to prepare for a dual-boot install, not about recovering a messed-up partition table (which is what I assume I am dealing with here). The disks were originally formatted ext4 with a single partition taking the whole of the disk. Since no file system was created on them and no data was written to them while they were in the RAID slots of the cage, I'm hoping I can repair things, but looking for ideas of where to start. Thanks in advance and in hope Mark PS Running buster if that's important
