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What's the best software for recovering data from an NTFS formatted JBOD drive?

  • What's the best software for recovering data from an NTFS formatted JBOD drive? I realize I made a mistake going with JBOD to store data. I didn't store anything earth shattering on this array, but I'd like to see if I can recover what I can. There were two disks - a 2TB and a 500GB. The 500GB is bricked. I'd like to see if I can find any usable data on the 2TB drive. Can you recommend decent software for scanning this drive? I'm running Windows 7. If you know of any decent communities for this sort of thing, I'd appreciate that too. All the ones I've found so far seem to tend more towards lecturing and then abandoning people asking for help.

  • Answer:

    What kind of data are you looking for? I would try http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec, but your luck at finding things depends on how the disks were stitched together.

Jupiter Jones at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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You may be out of luck depending on the specifics of the JBOD configuration. An unfortunately-named program that I've used previously with some success for NTFS recovery is http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm. They do have a free version which will show you the files but not recover them, so it's at least worth a shot to see what's on there.

j.edwards

I had a pair of drives striped with RAID 1 in an external enclosure attached to my Mac, formatted as HFS. When the enclosure died, I used http://www.r-tt.com/ successfully to recover my files. http://ask.metafilter.com/142617/Sad-cojoined-hard-drive-twins-seek-new-lease-of-life I realise that your situation's quite different, but I had a good experience with the software, so it's worth a look. Like j.edward's solution, they let you go right up to point of actual recovery for free, so it's worth a shot.

Magnakai

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/ is worth a fly as well. Trial version can recover a limited number of folders per pass; they're banking on your time being worth more to you than the price of their software.

flabdablet

JBOD is more likely to give you a good result than RAID-0, by the way, so you've got that going for you. If the NTFS master file table happened to end up fully contained on the big drive, which it probably would be if the big drive was first and the filesystem was not unreasonably fragmented, then all you might need to do is put your array back together with a second blank drive and you might be able to read everything off just by plugging it back into Windows; files with data blocks on the second drive would obviously come back full of bogus data. I'd be making image backups before trying any such thing, though.

flabdablet

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