One drive died in a spanned windows volume

[NeoAthlon]

  Ok, I had a pair of 2TB samsung HD204UI hdds running in a spanned windows volume with no backup, after a power supply failure one of them is completely dead, makes horrible noises and is not detected even in the bois.

The other drive appears to still be working fine, however windows will not bring the volume online without the second drive. I'm hoping for a free or cheap solution that will help me recover the lost data, being a spanned volume and not stripped I think this should be possible to recover the data that resides on the good drive.

 

 

I'm running windows 10 pro x64

EVGA 850BQ psu

Motherboard MSI z87m-g43

Intel i7-4770k

16GB Crucial Ballistix ddr3-1666

500GB Samsun 850 evo boot/os drive

3x 3TB Seagate Barracuda HDDs

plus the 2 samsung 2TB drives, one good one dead

[NinJake]

Were both of the drives full?

[NeoAthlon]

They were near full, if i had to guess I'd say around 90-95% usage of the volume, data isn't super critical so they've been just chilling on my desk for a couple weeks.

[samcool55]

Just now, NeoAthlon said:

They were near full, if i had to guess I'd say around 90-95% usage of the volume, data isn't super critical so they've been just chilling on my desk for a couple weeks.

Usually if you get a 2nd 2TB drive and give it to the raid it should start rebuilding it and work again.

Or you can plug it to another system and use a data recovery tool to get all the data off it.

[NeoAthlon]

Problem is it wasn't in a raid, it was just a volume spanned across the 2 drives using the windows disk management. So there was no parity drive, but if I understand the way spanned volumes work correctly, none of the data would actually be stripped across both drives. It would just be written to one drive till it was full, then start writing to the next, or possible balance the data load between the 2. So dead drive data = gone forever, live drive data should be recoverable... I think.

[Windows7ge]

3 minutes ago, NeoAthlon said:

They were near full, if i had to guess I'd say around 90-95% usage of the volume, data isn't super critical so they've been just chilling on my desk for a couple weeks.

60 seconds of research says spanning volume works by writing data to the first logical disk before writing data to the next. If the entire volume was about 90~95% utilized and one disk failed then I'm going to assume that about 1/2 of your data isn't recoverable unless you can revive the dead drive.

 

As for the one that is still alive there are free software recovery tools you can try. I cannot say it'll work but DiskDigger comes to mind.

[NeoAthlon]

Diskdigger appears to be working, it's at the very least finding the files I expected to see. Scan is going to take a few hours by the look of it, I'll update when complete.

 

Diskdigger is working, restoring files now, thank you for pointing me to something that works.

I had tried a couple other data recovery programs and wasn't having any luck, one was getdataback, don't remember the other. One of them was finding files but when it got to the restore step it failed with a volume not found error, the other would tell me it found a bunch of files, but wouldn't let me even preview anything without buying the full version.

 

If anyone else runs into a similar problem, diskdigger works, will show you all the files found, and let you restore 1 at a time without purchasing a license. Currently the license is only $15 and will then do bulk restore all at once.

Edited September 7, 2017 by NeoAthlon