Problem with old HDDs (missing volume?)|NEED HELP!

[Noamazia]

i have an old WD network storage device made from 2x1TB drives that doesn't work anymore. there was an option for RAID 1 but im not sure if i used it. i have alot of data that i must recover from them and i prefer to do so without a data recovery program because i want to maintain the folder heirarchy and not pay 80$ for it, ill do so if there is no other choice...
i connected the drives to my pc one after the other and they both looked like this:
 

the context menu wouldn't let me assign a letter to the big partition, so on one of the drives i tried creating another one for testing and made a new simple volume out of the unallocated segment. that changed the drive to this:

so i had letters for the partitions which are now all dynamic but couldn't access the drives...

i used partition wizard 4.2.2 and revert the drive back to basic and now i have this:

during this whole time the CMD:DISKPART told me that it can see the disk and partition but it can't see a volume for it. this is what it sees on the changed drive(c,d are on disks 0,1):

i still have 1 drive that have the original 4 basic partitions, also with no volume, and i dont know if it has the same data or not.

remo recovery shows me the data and i am now scanning the second drive to see if they are raided or not.

 

can some1 help me? is there a way i can still use the drives like normal without erasing the data?

[TehDwonz]

2 minutes ago, Noamazia said:

i have an old WD network storage device

 

i still have 1 drive that have the original 4 basic partitions, also with no volume, and i dont know if it has the same data or not.

remo recovery shows me the data and i am now scanning the second drive to see if they are raided or not.

 

can some1 help me? is there a way i can still use the drives like normal without erasing the data?

WD uses a CHEAP controller in their external devices, so large disks are partitioned off into smaller volumes. The only sensible way to access the data is to have them in the enclosure, or an identical one. Had this problem with a friend a few years ago, where his single-disk external disks could not be accessed. We had to shuffle the USB boards around between disks in order to read the data off. Not even a data recovery program like Piriform Recuva could actually see any useful data. (FYI, that program retains folder structure on recovered files).

 

You need to find a working board for the enclosure, basically. Possibly available on ebay or AliExpress?

[Noamazia]

1 hour ago, TehDwonz said:

You need to find a working board for the enclosure, basically. Possibly available on ebay or AliExpress?

its kinda hard... its my book world from before 2013.

do you think its possible by using a newer model? are you sure it wont erase the data once it notices a new HDD?

[Kilrah]

Since it was a NAS it'll likely have been running some flavor of linux and thus be using a filesystem Windows has no idea about. You might be able to get to the data booting from a linux live usb.

[Noamazia]

5 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Since it was a NAS it'll likely have been running some flavor of linux and thus be using a filesystem Windows has no idea about. You might be able to get to the data booting from a linux live usb.

i will try that!

[Noamazia]

9 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Since it was a NAS it'll likely have been running some flavor of linux and thus be using a filesystem Windows has no idea about. You might be able to get to the data booting from a linux live usb.

ok so i tried it using puppylinux that i have. i could not get to the files:
pDisk showed that the both drives had 4 partitions and thery were all "linux_raid_something" instead of NTFS/FAT.
mdadm told me showed that the drive were both raid 1 but 1 had 4 partitions and 1 had 2 like in windows...
and almost every app thrown an error: mount, gnome-disks-utility.
fsck would just output it's version. and even if ran

fsck.ext2/4 -N -V

it didnt recognize any superblocks on the drives (not the i know if it really is using ext 2 or 4).... am i screwed?

[Kilrah]

The reason one drive has more partitions is likely that's where the NASes OS lived. 

 

See if you specify both the partitions to mdadm it recognises a valid array... If it does but you still can't mount it could be using a different filesystem than ext4, try to install support for btrfs, zfs, xfs,...