sporgo
6th December 2008, 16:06
I am working on recovering data from a western digital 1TB "My Book" (which should be called "My Brick" IMO) Before I begin with ZAR I would like to get some opinions on what my chances are of getting my files back with ZAR. I have tried several other raid recovery programs with little success so far.
This version of the mybook has two 500GB raid drives setup in raid0 or striped mode. Both of the drives are functional the problem appears to be that the enclosure has gone bad. So I have removed the drives from the enclosure and hooked them up to a raid controller in my desktop.
I tried contacting Western Digital to find out what the raid configuration for these drives is by default but all they do is put you on hold forever while they try to find someone who knows (which they never find).
Some of the data recovery programs I have used determine that the stripe size is 128KB but I have no idea whether there is any offset. Someone told me that these enclosures use some kind of linux operating system inside the enclosure Im not sure if that influences the raid settings. The format type is NTFS.
I have successfullly recovered several large video files from the drives using R-studio but the photos I get back are corrupted. The thumbnails look fine but when you open them they are all scrambled and different colors. It does not make sense to me that I can recover large video files which are certainly split all over the drives, while 1-3 MB photos come out corrupt.
I do not think that the photos are corrupt I believe that the software I am using is simply unable to retrieve them correctly probably due to some small file table corruption or something....
What makes me belive this is that I have a trial version of a program from Diskinternals called Raid Recovery that can see these photos at full size without any corruption unfortunately that program is to expesive for me at the moment ($250). The trial wont let you save anything at all.
I have no clue what makes the diskinternals program able to see the photos correctly while so many other programs can not. What are the chances that ZAR will be able to retrieve my photos?
Is it safe to repeatedly examine the drives to rediscover the file structure? Some of these programs scan for hours and hours and I am a bit concerned that this may possibly lead to loss of data but Im not sure. I have not attempted to do any write operations or make any repairs to the file structure as Im sure that is a bad idea at this point.
This version of the mybook has two 500GB raid drives setup in raid0 or striped mode. Both of the drives are functional the problem appears to be that the enclosure has gone bad. So I have removed the drives from the enclosure and hooked them up to a raid controller in my desktop.
I tried contacting Western Digital to find out what the raid configuration for these drives is by default but all they do is put you on hold forever while they try to find someone who knows (which they never find).
Some of the data recovery programs I have used determine that the stripe size is 128KB but I have no idea whether there is any offset. Someone told me that these enclosures use some kind of linux operating system inside the enclosure Im not sure if that influences the raid settings. The format type is NTFS.
I have successfullly recovered several large video files from the drives using R-studio but the photos I get back are corrupted. The thumbnails look fine but when you open them they are all scrambled and different colors. It does not make sense to me that I can recover large video files which are certainly split all over the drives, while 1-3 MB photos come out corrupt.
I do not think that the photos are corrupt I believe that the software I am using is simply unable to retrieve them correctly probably due to some small file table corruption or something....
What makes me belive this is that I have a trial version of a program from Diskinternals called Raid Recovery that can see these photos at full size without any corruption unfortunately that program is to expesive for me at the moment ($250). The trial wont let you save anything at all.
I have no clue what makes the diskinternals program able to see the photos correctly while so many other programs can not. What are the chances that ZAR will be able to retrieve my photos?
Is it safe to repeatedly examine the drives to rediscover the file structure? Some of these programs scan for hours and hours and I am a bit concerned that this may possibly lead to loss of data but Im not sure. I have not attempted to do any write operations or make any repairs to the file structure as Im sure that is a bad idea at this point.