In case you need it,,, great data recovery tool

larry-peter wrote on 6/3/2016, 8:24 AM

I had the fright of my life yesterday when we had a major power outage while my RAID 0 drive was performing a backup. When power was restored after several hours, my RAID was no longer seen by my computer. Disk Administrator said it was uninitialized with no allocated space. Wanted me to reformat. Contained lots of character animation renders just completed as well as spots that hadn't been delivered yet. The data recovery tools I had on hand couldn't determine the file structure and several I downloaded that were specific to RAID 0 wanted me to dismantle the disks from the RAID enclosure and connect directly to the motherboard. Plus, I needed to have available storage of 3X the size of the array. Uh, scary, considering that my current backup was unsuccessful.

Then I found Testdisk at Sourceforge's site. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download A free command line app (don't fear the console) that allowed me to test several disk configurations and file structures and when the correct one was selected...voila, I could see my files in the console window. It then allowed me to write the new partition information to the array, and on reboot - there was my RAID. It also contains great tools for more basic file recovery, undelete, etc.
Hope this can help others.

Comments

Byron K wrote on 6/3/2016, 6:33 PM

Thanks for sharing. I tools like this are great.

VidMus wrote on 6/3/2016, 6:58 PM

I accidently deleted the partition on the wrong drive and reformatted it. TestDisk brought the entire thing back up.

It was a HUGE life saver.

But that was a spinner drive. On my SSD drive a simple delete and empty the recycle bin nothing could restore the file. I think it was set for secure erase.

Hulk wrote on 6/3/2016, 7:18 PM

There is nothing quite like that feeling when you think you may have lost all of your data. It's terrible. I've been there, done that. Now I have everything backed up on a laptop, HTPC, desktop, a drive connected to my wireless router, and a drive in my fireproof safe!

PeterDuke wrote on 6/3/2016, 7:32 PM

On the download page it says, " Windows 64-bit - Use only on systems lacking WoW64 as some features are missing"

What is wow64?

larry-peter wrote on 6/4/2016, 11:00 AM

From my limited understanding, WoW64 is a subsystem that allows 32 bit programs to run in a 64 bit environment. I don't know if the "personal" or "home" versions of current Windows have it, since I've never owned them, but the Professional 64 bit versions do. I downloaded the other Windows version on the page and it worked like a charm.