Please Help! Problem after problem with hard drive(s)

Hero9989

Hero9989

Hero9989

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4 Sep 2009
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So - I was one of those people who thought - who needs backups, etc, etc... I had
2x3TB drives in a windows span - resulting in a 6TB drive holding all of my blu ray movie rips (X:)
2x3TB drives in a windows span - resulting in a 6TB drive holding all of my TV Show Boxsets (Y:)

While copying files to Y: one day I noticed it kept failing so I ran checks etc and it turns out one of the drives in the Y: span was failing.

The next day I went to Overclockers and bought a Seagate 8TB Archive drive.
After trying and failing to get the files off Y: onto the 8TB I gave up and decided that there wasn't anything on there that wasn't replaceable - I'd just have to re-rip a pile of blu rays/dvds. Everything that mattered as well as my movies were on X: so that's fine.
I decided to do the following:
  1. Copy everything I have onto the new 8TB Drive
  2. Format the 3 remaining working 3TB drives as separate drives (P: Q: R:)
  3. Distribute everything that's now on the 8TB drive to the 3x3TB drives
  4. Use the 8TB drive as a rolling backup and use the 3x3TB drives as the drives that actually serve the data to my devices.
I had just finished step 2 and I decided to restart the computer. The computer just came back up and I have been informed that the 8TB drive now needs initializing :eek: :(

Have I just lost everything?!? The X drive had a lot of irreplaceable stuff on it... Not just movies - it had other things as well. Photos, old work documents. Is there ANYTHING I can do to get this drive to recognise again? I have done literally nothing


TLDR: I bought an 8TB drive, copied all my data to it, restarted my computer and now windows says it needs initializing. Is there anything I can do to get at my data??

Thank you in advance!!
 
Vargas said:
I assume you've switched the 8tb disk on/off?

Did you quick format the other disks?
Click to expand...
Yes and yes

I should add though - the other drives were part of windows spans. So only half of each file was kept on each drive (Raid 0 essentially). So recovery software won't help :/
 
Lesson #1: never have only one copy of your important files! Before doing all this shuffling of drives, you needed to have a backup.

First thing to try: plug the 8TB drive into another computer, in case there is something wrong with the SATA port. If you don't have another PC, do you have a USB to SATA adapter (i.e. the bones of an external USB drive)? It has to be able to support 8TB drives though.

If the data on the 3 drives is truly important, a data recovery service would probably be able to get some stuff back. Spanned drives aren't like RAID at all, it's more like the 2nd drive starts to getting used when the 1st one is full.
 
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