Help, cant view data on hard drives

nightrider1470

nightrider1470

nightrider1470

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I have 2 hard drives that I had running in a 2bay enclosure...I think they were running in raid 1 or jbod, I cant remember

Any way I wanted to run these drives in my new HTPC and use my enclosure for 2x 6TB Drives I have ordered.

I have attached the 2x original hard drives to my PC and I cant seem to view my data, and am panicking abit now.

What can I do? Windows disk management doesnt allow me to do anything and all options are greyed out

Bottom 2 drives on pic

 
Can't you put them back in the enclosure and copy off the data? If they were in RAID or JBOD I don't think you will be able to read them outside of that controller they were set up on...
 
It is unlikely that your NAS used a file format which is compatible with Windows - you will need to put these drives back in the enclosure, and access the data in the normal way.

Then, you can decide what to do with this data from there.
 
By "enclosure" do you mean an external disk box which was attached to you PC or a completely separate NAS?

With the latter it is probably running some form of Linux under the hood so the disks will not be readable by Windows by default.

I agree with the above that it would be better to access the data by using the disks in their original location (or by just recovering from your backup).
 
Try right clicking on the blue sections and assigning a drive letter to it since it looks like there isn't one for any of them. Beyond that I have no idea :(

Stoner81.
 
The disks don't look like they were in a raid configuration as they have totally different partition sizes so I guess they wern't in any kind of mirror or stripe. If you can't plug them into what they came out of to recover the data and you have nothing to lose, right click on the drive and click convert to dynamic disk, this has in the past allowed me to access data on GPT partitions (This tends to be very OS dependent and you probably wont have any success using home editions).

Image below showing the option.


image posting

GPT disks tend to be os controlled and will be gpt as MBR only supports partition sizes of around 2.2tb so whatever that software controller was on the nas it also allows for lots of partitions if you are using lots of lets say for example luns on some kind of vm config, if you can convert them to dynamic using windows it is very likely that you will be able to see your data.

If none of this works and you have lots of spare space (enough to hold two full size disk images of those disks) then all is not lost, I would recommend using something like macrium reflect (free software) to create an image of both drives and then using something like AOMEI Partition Assistant which is also free software you can convert the GPT partitions to MBR while retaining the data. Please back up the drives if you can before giving this a bash.

But again as others have said easiest way is put them back in the box they came out of and copy the data off. Surely the easy option here would be to pop them back in the enclosure and when the new big drives arrive put one in the pc and copy all the data from those disks to a single drive. Then you can remove those drives and add single one to the enclosure, wipe the others, copy... you get the picture.
 
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You could lose all the data if you're not careful here.

I assume you mean top two drives.


-edit, why does your C drive have a 6.33gb System Reserved partition?


First step..

What device were they in before?
If it's a NAS, then it's likely to be a file format that Windows can't read, like EXT4.

Can you pop them back in there to retrieve the data?

Final point

Just restore the data from your backu....
 
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