OT: IT emergency - file recovery

[Hugo Nebula]

Oh bugger!

I accidently deleted a couple of large folders from my NAS disk, and I'd like to recover them. What's the best way to go about it? In the process I may have made things worse.

I have a D-Link DNS 323 NAS w/ a single 3.5" SATA HDD in. Googling suggested I connect this HDD to my PC (which is a laptop with a 2.5" drive, so not possible directly), so I bought a cheap docking station from PCWorld. So far so good; this device allows the drive to run & be accessed in a fashion from the PC (Windows 7).

However, the free file recovery programs don't recognise the disk as a 'drive' in the same way an external USB drive would be. In Disk Management, I stupidly converted the disk from Basic to Dynamic. Now three lettered partitions show up, but the disk is unreadable by the NAS. The data can't be accessed by the PC or recovered by any freeware without formatting the disk (which sort of defeats the point of trying to recover the data I would have thought). I can't convert it back without wiping the rest of my data.

Am I stuffed?

[Tim Watts]

A quick google suggests that that NAS *might* be using EXT2 or 3 as its filesystem - that's a linux filesystem BTW.

I would find someone who runs linux. or boot your PC with a live CD (eg Ubuntu) version (no local install needed).

However, undelete on EXT2/3 is non trivial as the filesystem makes no effort to assist and undelete tools are rather hit or miss in this case. The most important thing is to stop fiddling with the drive until you are ready to make a concerted attempt to recover.

It depends on how "valuable" these files arr vs the effort you think it is worth.

Cheers,

Tim

[www.GymRatZ.co.uk]

Have you tried recuva

tried it on a HDD but it offers drive location and it's free. Actually quite an eye opening thing to run on random memory cards... Be careful if they're not yours though, you never know what you might find or from how many years ago!!!

8¬O

Pete

[D.M.Chapman]

I thin the Dlink nas boxes are linux based, so the disk will have been ext2 or similar. Don't know if the tools you tried understand that.

As it was a single spindle, there won't have been any clever Raid going on so there is a fairly good chance the data will still be there.

Just how valuable is the missing data? No backups I take it.

Ah. That's not ideal..

I suspect you now have a disk with the remains of a linux filesystem that windows has crapped over with a new partition table.

Again, I suspect that's not completely terminal (yet) but it's made things a fair bit more complicated.

Again, just how valuable is the data on here?

Without a lot of faffing, yes. With a lot of faffing - maybe.

I suspect you need to put the partition table back to whatever the NAS uses and then run something to recover from the now broken (probably) ext2 file system. No idea how to do this, I've usually hit the backups a long time back in cases like this.

The more you fiddle, the more damage you are likely to do. If you really want to try then get another disk the same size (or bigger) and a hardware cloner.

That will let you fiddle with the copy, without risk of further damage to the data. Not cheap, and probably easier to just pay a data recovery company. Plenty out there, no idea how good they are... we've had great experiences with some but I don't know who.

Good luck

Darren

[brass monkey]

There's a freeware linux data recovery running on windows here -

recovery 3.1

[The Natural Philosopher]

probably

Might be possible uinder Linux

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Hugo Nebula escribió:

Download and run TestDisk from

and search for partitions. 99% chance that it'll find them and recover files.

During your titting about, you've written a new partition table and/or boot record to the disk. The partitions will be Linux ext3 or 4 and not recognisable by Windows, but TestDisk will find them.