WD NetCenter drive swap gone bad

[paul068]

My goal was to replace a working Western Digital 160GB NetCenter network hard drive and replace it with a larger hard drive.

I removed the 160GB network drive from the Western Digital NetCenter and plugged it in the XP machine as a slave to move all the files to a larger drive. The drive was not readily available in My Computer so I opened XP's Disk Management to view the drive status.

Disk Management listed the drive as unknown/unallocated so I selected Initialize drive. I was not able to view files but the status changed to Basic with File System unknown and not healthy.

I decided to put the 160GB drive back into the NetCenter unit and proceed to move files over the network to a larger drive. After booting the NetCenter unit, the drive was unrecognizable. I opened the WD NC Drive Management software to view the status and it reported No Volume Defined.

I took the drive back out of the unit and put back into the XP machine, tried the above listed method again, still nothing. I ended up running PTDD Partition Table Doctor 3.5 on the drive and it found partition 2 and 3 were separated. I let PTDD do its thing. Then put the drive back into netcenter and still same No Volume Defined status.

I used GetDataBack and recovered a lot but so much is missing. I basically recovered some .jpg, .bmp, .doc, .xls, and .gif but .txt, .zips, .pdfs, .iso, .exe, .pst etc is nowhere to be found. No folder names or structure or filenames were recovered.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Is it possible to put back changes Partition Table Doctor made without further damage?

 

[dbData]

It's been my experience that most network storage devices(NAS, SAN, etc) use Linux to run the disk(s). The file system is usually ext2 or ext3. Putting one of these in a Windows box and mucking with the partition will get you what you have now. I believe PTDD is intended for FAT/FAT32 and perhaps NTFS.

Check with the manufacturer to confirm the file system that was used before you do much else.

If my suspicion is correct, I suggest looking for data extraction software like R-Studio for Linux (which runs in Windows). Otherwise, you can go to a Linux bootable CD like Knoppix and hack your way around. Be prepared to read a lot of text.



Rick

http://www.iswamp.com

 

[wahnula]

This utility:

http://getfreesofts.com/soft/449/39090/UFS_Explorer_Professional.html

is also shareware and works on just about any file system.

Best of luck.

Tony

 

[sparkbyte]

I don't know if you've done anything with this yet.

What you did:

1. Removed the drive from a netCenter NAS device.
Usually not a problem.
2. Put this drive into an XP workstation.
Still OK.
3. started diskmanager to see if you could assign a logical drive letter to the drive.
OK, but said that the drive was unrecognizable and you should have STOPPED here!
4. Chose to Initialize the drive.
Now this is where things got really bad. Initializing a drive in XP put a NEW FAT/NTFS partition table on the drive.

Now what you are going to have to do, which is what everyone else is pointing to, is find an utility that will restore the original partition table.

Ext2 and Ext3 (LINUX) keep a secondary copy of the FAT tables just in case things get corrupted. IF that was the format of the drive BEFORE you initialized it for XP there should be Doc's on the web for restoring from the backup EXT2/EXT3 FAT table. This is a long shot but if you can't afford or the data doesn't warrent you shipping the drive to a data recovering company it might be worth trying.

Hope that helps.



Thanks

John Fuhrman
Titan Global Services

http://www.titangs.com