Re: Rescuing hard disks
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
Posible Options:
1. if you use lilo, look for a copy of parttions table.
2. create the parttion exactly as it was.
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