Hello there, long time lurker, but haven't posted. seems I've found what I needed to survive for 15 years until this day. I have an interesting situation that I've trying to resolve....
I have a hard drive (4Tb) that has a lot of important content on it I was using on a FreeNAS (NAS4free) system for quite some time. I thought that the server was Mirroring to another 4Tb drive, but it seems the backup was failing the last few years, so I opted to try and update the hardware and software to TrueNAS. While setting up the new drive and leaving the old one in tact, the following ensued....
- the primary drive was formatted under a UFS GPT drive file system and I couldn't copy the data over a network as the old system would crash.
- I thought to connect to my Pi4 and access the drive through a USB HD dock, but came to realize the Pi4 doesn't recognize a GPT drive....
- I accidentally converted the drive through a command (newb mistake) from GPT to MRB and thought I lost all of my content (~15 years of family photos....)
- using a recovery tool through a windows machine, I managed to back up 1.5Tb of data from the drive (the 4TB capacity wasn't fully utilized)
- I managed to run a scan with testdisk under the pi4, and after the 'deep search', the tool found a lot of partitions. a lot.... in 8-30sector increments... unfortunately testdisk only allows me to select one partition as the primary, and will attempt to delete the rest. so I opted to pause on that click... interestingly, the deeper search found two sectors with the same folder name path '/mnt/Server/' where I thought the content could be accessed from.
- currently, I'm unable to access the UFS GPT drive as an old laptop won't run FreeBSD due to network driver compatibility issues, although I'm trying to use my old Pi3 to run a FreeBSD variant on the Pi3
I'd like to attempt to recover the drive, and its contents as they are. whether it's via stitching, merging all the partitions together, or using another tool I just haven't come across to recover the drive back to its original partitioned state.
I would love to hear what some experts here would suggest to resolve this as I'm out of options trying to search for over 2 weeks.
Thanks again for your time in advance, and I'm really looking forward to hearing from you all!
I have a hard drive (4Tb) that has a lot of important content on it I was using on a FreeNAS (NAS4free) system for quite some time. I thought that the server was Mirroring to another 4Tb drive, but it seems the backup was failing the last few years, so I opted to try and update the hardware and software to TrueNAS. While setting up the new drive and leaving the old one in tact, the following ensued....
- the primary drive was formatted under a UFS GPT drive file system and I couldn't copy the data over a network as the old system would crash.
- I thought to connect to my Pi4 and access the drive through a USB HD dock, but came to realize the Pi4 doesn't recognize a GPT drive....
- I accidentally converted the drive through a command (newb mistake) from GPT to MRB and thought I lost all of my content (~15 years of family photos....)
- using a recovery tool through a windows machine, I managed to back up 1.5Tb of data from the drive (the 4TB capacity wasn't fully utilized)
- I managed to run a scan with testdisk under the pi4, and after the 'deep search', the tool found a lot of partitions. a lot.... in 8-30sector increments... unfortunately testdisk only allows me to select one partition as the primary, and will attempt to delete the rest. so I opted to pause on that click... interestingly, the deeper search found two sectors with the same folder name path '/mnt/Server/' where I thought the content could be accessed from.
- currently, I'm unable to access the UFS GPT drive as an old laptop won't run FreeBSD due to network driver compatibility issues, although I'm trying to use my old Pi3 to run a FreeBSD variant on the Pi3
I'd like to attempt to recover the drive, and its contents as they are. whether it's via stitching, merging all the partitions together, or using another tool I just haven't come across to recover the drive back to its original partitioned state.
I would love to hear what some experts here would suggest to resolve this as I'm out of options trying to search for over 2 weeks.
Thanks again for your time in advance, and I'm really looking forward to hearing from you all!