Help fix partition on RAID 5 using TestDisk

I would I like to ask for help or some pointers on partition fixing a copy of a RAID 5 array.

I'll try to make the full story short so someone will bother to read it.

Seagate Blackarmor 400 with 3 disks, 2tb each in a RAID 5 setup.

It goes bad and I can't recover (This NAS is a piece of junk IMO), so I connect the disks to PC and find out disc 2 can't read.

I use ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery on the 2 remaining disc and from what I understand everyhting looks pretty good.

I use the option to write array to disc. now I have a 4tb LaCie external HD and it warns me it will override everything and also a size warning (the size is exactly the same) but I try it anyway.

Now after that is done I do not see the drive anymore, and I find a mention that the partition table might be in the wrong place or something like that.

So I feel a bit out of my depth as I'm not very knowledgeable about partitions. Could anyone give me a nudge in the right direction?

This is what I see using TestDisk:

Select a media, excluding other disks, a C: drive and the 3 raid discs
Code:
Select a media

Disk /dev/sde - 4000 GB / 3726 GiB
Disk \\.PhysicalDrive4 - 4000 GB / 3726 GiB

It seems the LaCie is mentioned twice, so is the C:

I proceed on Disk /dev/sde - 4000 GB / 3726 GiB and it gives me EFI GPT as default option. I run Analysis on that.

Code:
Bad GPT patition, invalid signature.
Trying alternate GPT
Bad GPT patition, invalid signature.

I have no idea what this is. I can only choice Quick Search

Code:
TestDisk 7.0, Data Recovery Utility, April 2015
Christophe GRENIER <[email protected]>
http://www.cgsecurity.org

Disk /dev/sde - 4000 GB / 3726 GiB - CHS 60800 255 63
     Partition               Start        End    Size in sectors
>P MS Data                       63  968785530  968785468 [LaCie]
 P MS Data                968785531  976754645    7969115 [LACIE SHARE]

Structure: Ok.  Use Up/Down Arrow keys to select partition.
Use Left/Right Arrow keys to CHANGE partition characteristics:
                P=Primary  D=Deleted
Keys A: add partition, L: load backup, T: change type, P: list files,
     Enter: to continue

Hmm this looks suspiciously like something that was present after LaCie initializing software ran originally (it was a new drive and the init created two drives/shares, one FAT 32 gb in size and a NTFS one.

So what is going on here, am I out of luck , what is my next step?
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
Sorry for the slow response, no one here looks at the forum too much over the weekends.

I honestly don't think "restoring" the partition table is even the right direction to be looking in. Most likely the partition is in the wrong place because the RAID array settings are wrong and it's looking for a file system in the entirely wrong place, on the wrong disk, etc. Software that tries to automatically detect RAID settings almost always fails. When you're only working with 2 out of 3 members, it absolutely always fails as there isn't enough data for it to compare.

That having been said, there's a ton of us here who can manually rebuild the array for you using R-Studio. I doubt the process will take more than a few minutes, but it will require you to at least buy a $79 copy of the program (demo here) . That or one of us who has a tech license can plug in their key remotely, however I don't think most of us will do that just for free anyway.

Are you willing to let someone remote in and recover it, and/or donate a bit for their time?
 
Jared":2hurs2zm said:
Sorry for the slow response, no one here looks at the forum too much over the weekends.

I honestly don't think "restoring" the partition table is even the right direction to be looking in. Most likely the partition is in the wrong place because the RAID array settings are wrong and it's looking for a file system in the entirely wrong place, on the wrong disk, etc. Software that tries to automatically detect RAID settings almost always fails. When you're only working with 2 out of 3 members, it absolutely always fails as there isn't enough data for it to compare.

That having been said, there's a ton of us here who can manually rebuild the array for you using R-Studio. I doubt the process will take more than a few minutes, but it will require you to at least buy a $79 copy of the program (demo here) . That or one of us who has a tech license can plug in their key remotely, however I don't think most of us will do that just for free anyway.

Are you willing to let someone remote in and recover it, and/or donate a bit for their time?

Yes I would, however the biggest problem for me currently is space, I have a external 4TB disk I planned on moving the recovered data to, if I have to take images and all that jazz beforehand there won't be much room. I just bought a extra hard drive for the original array, was hoping the NAS might just rebuild it.

I'm planning on trying out the tutorial you have on imaging with ddrescue first in case something goes wrong and then I might contact you again for help if needed (the NAS rebuild doesnt work). I'm tech savvy enough myself but hard drives and partitions is just not something I've studied.
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
If you create the images using R-Studio (even just the demo) they'll be a compressed format that I can still work with to rebuild the RAID. Only issue is it doesn't handle bad sectors well, and there's always the strong possibility of hitting some. Especially given that they're Seagate drives.
 
In theory I should be able to fit the two images on my 4 TB disc right, in practice I'm sure I will be a few bytes short. I'll see if I'll fit both using ddrescue method for imaging.

I'll then report on how it goes and we can determine some sort of tribute for your help.
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
It will not fit both using ddrescue because the filesystem of the 4TB takes up some space so you're left with just under 4TB of actual space. However for the purpose of recovering the RAID the last few MB of one disk may not make any difference. Probably isn't any data there anyway.
 
Both discs have 95,3 MB of unallocated space in front and 96,3 MB unallocated at the end.

They also have several partitions and marked in Macrium Reflect as

1019,5 MB - ext primary
1020,4 MB - unformatted primary
509,3 MB - ext primary
1.82 TB - unformatted primary

Those marked unformatted are shown as nearly full while the others are around 15% and 5% full

Screenshot - 22.2.2016 , 21_18_55.png

Could this help me in anyway reducing the image size, even if only a little bit?
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
The extra 96MB at the end is helpful. If you image with ddrescue and complete the image of one drive, then just image the other until the 4TB drive is full. Hopefully it won't be more than 96MB which isn't imaged.
 
Finished one drive without errors, when around halfway done with the second one the electricity in my town went out (talk about timing) and the masterfile seems corrupt, just get encoding errors and its filled with \00 or # characters. I guess I will have to restart that one.
 
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