Importing NTFS failed, does HDD the get formatted?

[Leslie]

Hi All

I'm a new user to FreeNAS - actually, I tried to be a new user.... Let me tell you my story:

I have a Windows Server running Plex that contains 2x1TB Seagate ST1000DM drives (NTFS). Windows is installed on an older IDE Western Digital 250GB hdd. All my media is split across the Seagate drives. Each drive contains about 600GB of data.

Recently, A friend gave me a (blank, unused, factory sealed) 750GB Seagate ST375033. I had another 200GB Seagate ST3200827AS lying around, so I figured now would be a good time to try the NAS..

I used VMware Fusion to boot FreeNAS-9.3-CURRENT-201503130047 and install to a 16GB no-name USB stick.

The Windows Server is just a generic PC that I built years ago: Asus M2NPV-VM, Athlon X2 4800+ and 4GB RAM)

Before I got started with FreeNAS, I removed the IDE HDD with Windows, put the 750GB HDD and the 250 GB HDD on to Sata1 and Sata2 respectively on the motherboard. I put the 2x1TB drives onto Sata3 and Sata4.

The machine booted to the FreeNAS USB stick and went on its way. Since the no-name USB stick cant be verified, the iops aren't great. It was really slow to boot. Really, really, really slow.

Once I got the system up and onto the network, I launched the WebUI and went through the wizard. At the volume creation stage, I could only select Automatic or Logs, so I went with Automatic. The wizard mentioned something about formatting 2 drives - I honestly could not determine which drives it was going to format, so I haphazardly assumed/hoped that it was the 750GB and 200GB drives. The /dev/XXXX name wasnt much help, nor did it list the sizes of the drives.

The wizard completed and I went on to attempt to import my data from one of the NTFS drives. I selected one of the drives and selected the mount point, which was the volume. It started the process and then I clicked on "Process in background"

I let it sit for awhile and looked around at other menus, not making any other changes. I eventually found that the import failed for some cryptic message, which I did not jot down or research. It was now 130AM and I was getting tired. I decided to just shutdown the FreeNAS and try again "later"...

So when I got up in the morning, I pulled the USB stick and put the WD IDE back in. Last night I had noticed during the FreeNAS boot, smartd found bad sectors on the 200GB drive, so I pulled it from the system as well.

I booted back up into Windows and I don't "see" any of my SATA HDDs. I launch drive management and notice that each of the 1TB drives is reporting as 900-and-change unallocated space. The 750GB HDD is also reporting 690-and-change unallocated space.

I'm ok with the 750GB drive being empty, it always was empty.

I don't understand what happened to my 1TB drives? I've read the install documentation and it seems to indicate that only blank/non-formatted drives get formatted during install. Performing an import also does not format drives.

Do I need to do some magic with gParted or something else to recover these drives? Part of me is hoping that this is just a Windows limitation and my data isn't really all gone...


Thanks and sorry for the long read.

 

[BigDave]

The two 1TB drives formatted capacity would be approx 931GB for NTFS in windows.
By formatting these two drives in Freenas, you have changed the file format to a file
system not recognized by Windows.
You cannot now "import" the disks because for all intents and purposes they have been overwritten
and the data that WAS on them is now gone.
During the wizard process, it warned you about this...

 

[BigDave]

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard 8.6
Do a search for this program, it will allow you
a basic install and you can recover a limited amount
of data for free, but I can't remember exactly how many GB they allow
before you have to pay for the full version.

 

[Leslie]

The two 1TB drives formatted capacity would be approx 931GB for NTFS in windows.
By formatting these two drives in Freenas, you have changed the file format to a file
system not recognized by Windows.
You cannot now "import" the disks because for all intents and purposes they have been overwritten
and the data that WAS on them is now gone.
During the wizard process, it warned you about this...

Hm.

When I created the initial volume, I am fairly certain that only the 750GB and 200GB drives were used. I think this is clear because when I went to IMPORT the 1TB drives, they were mounted as NTFS. Doesn't that indicate that these drives WERE NOT formatted?

Thanks for the recommendation of that data recovery....

 

[BigDave]

I hope you are right about the 1TB drives, but I don't think it's possible to import
NTFS formatted drives to FreeNAS. Good luck :)

 

[Leslie]

I hope you are right about the 1TB drives, but I don't think it's possible to import
NTFS formatted drives to FreeNAS. Good luck :)

As per the 9.3 Official Documents:

http://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_storage.html?highlight=ntfs#import-disk

"The Volume ‣ Import Disk screen, shown in Figure 8.1f, is used to import a single disk that has been formatted with the UFS, NTFS, MSDOS, or EXT2/3 filesystem. The import is meant to be a temporary measure in order to copy the data from a disk to an existing ZFS dataset. Only one disk can be imported at a time."

 

[Leslie]

Side question - since I still have the USB stick that has the FreeNAS installation, where are system logs stored? Would there be any logs of what I did?

 

[BigDave]

where are system logs stored

Log data would be stored on the pool.