Set up Raid 1, data erased, HELP!

[rotorhead8]

SOLVED: Set up Raid 1, data erased, HELP!

Hey all, newb-ish here. I have a buffalo linkstation ls421, 2 x 2tb hard drives. I went to set up a raid 1 array (not knowing it would reformat the drive) and lost all my data on that drive. Is there any way I can recover this data? Thanks in advance!


UPDATE: Thank you all for the suggestions! I was actually able to get a good amount of data back (with the majority of the folder names as well) by using Raise Data Recovery for XFS by Sysdev Labs... Worked great! This drive wasn't critical, but it is definitely nice to have the data back (years worth of pics).

 

[JohnnyStål]

Never tried it myself but this seems popular. http://www.piriform.com/recuva
Best of luck.

 

[Terry Kennedy]

Never tried it myself but this seems popular. http://www.piriform.com/recuva
Best of luck.

Most commercial NAS devices seem to use some flavor of Linux filesystem. Thus, a recovery tool that only understands Windows filesystems may not work. And that's before you get into the fact that most of these tools need block-level access to the drive(s) in question, which isn't often available on a remote NAS.

If the data is very important and irreplaceable, I'd suggest a commercial data recovery service. ($$$)

If it falls into the "nice to have, but no big deal if I don't get it back" category, I'd try putting the NAS drives into a box running Linux and using a Linux-based recovery tool (sorry, don't know of any) to try to recover the data.

Note that you get one shot at this - if you choose the second alternative and then decide you want commercial recovery, you may get less data back than if you'd just gone with the commercial service in the first place.

If this was a NAS preconfigured with disks (as opposed to bring-your-own), either method may void the warranty on the NAS.

I'm not sure why converting a disk to a RAID 1 set would erase the data, particularly without warning you first. The recoverability of user data would depend on what exactly the NAS did. If it built the volume on the new disk and then added the old disk with existing data to the RAID set, then it would normally do a block-for-block copy of the new (blank) disk onto the old (good data) disk. In that case, it wouldn't be recoverable as none of the data still exists.

On the other hand, if it just deleted the partition on the old disk with good data and then image copied that to the new disk, some data should be recoverable.

 

[rotorhead8]

Thank you all for the suggestions! I was actually able to get a good amount of data back (with the majority of the folder names as well) by using Raise Data Recovery for XFS by Sysdev Labs... Worked great! This drive wasn't critical, but it is definitely nice to have the data back (years worth of pics).