On 23/09/2019 08:37, Debian Buster wrote:
On Sun, 22 Sep 2019 23:40:51 +0100, Mark Fletcher wrote:
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
Hello, you can try the "testdisk" utility. I had good luck recovering
deleted or damaged partitions with it before. Hope the raid controller
didn't start zeroing out the drives as soon as you switched it on, it
would make things much more difficult if anything was written over.
Good luck.
