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Entire Disk Contents Gone

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tuaris
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Entire Disk Contents Gone

Post by tuaris »

I'm not expecting much, but I was hoping to get some insight into what happened. Here is the story:

I (had) a FreeNAS system with a single 750GB SATA disk. It was formatted using all the defaults, UFS, GTP, shared over NFS, SMB, AFP.
It worked well for several years, stored ISO and optical media images on it. I had confidence in this FreeNAS box. The file system was about 90% full when the unexplained happened.

A week ago, as I was trying to access an NFS export from this box on a FreeBSD server. The NFS share was mounted properly but took a moment to "access". After about 30 to 45 seconds of waiting it timed out. I dismounted and remounted. I was surprised to see that all the data was gone. I went on the the FreeNAS box and it said 0% used. I rebooted the FreeNAS box, no change.

Prior to this (literately minutes ago) I had accessed the same disk over an SMB share on a Windows machine to read some files off it. Nothing was out of the ordinary, my system has no viruses or malware, etc.

I am at a loss for an explanation, 45 seconds isn't much time to comply delete everything without a trace. I sent the drive to Ontrack data recovery and they said the data was not recoverable. I didn't do anything destructive to the drive after I removed it from the FreeNAS box. Testdisk sees the UFS partition, but it's inaccessible when I try to mount on another FreeBSD system.

I am just wondering if anyone may have a clue as to what could have happened? Ontrack didn't report any hardware issues with the drive.

al562
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Re: Entire Disk Contents Gone

Post by al562 »

I am sorry for your loss.
Without more specific information (system version, drive brand, SMART test result, manufacturer's test results, etc.) it is hard to tell what might have happened. Based on what you've written I think the drive might have some bad sectors in the partition area. This would mean the data recoverable should be recoverable with a tool like ddrescue.
In my experience the only time Ontrack cannot recover data is when there is a physical problem with the drive. If this were the case they should have told you what is wrong. Since they claim there is no physical problem then the biggest mystery I see is why they were unable to recover data. Personally I would not have sent the drive out before trying to recover the data myself.
[quote=tuaris]45 seconds isn't much time to comply delete everything without a trace.[/quote]It's plenty if the partition table is corrupt.
[quote=tuaris]Testdisk sees the UFS partition, but it's inaccessible when I try to mount on another FreeBSD system.[/quote]OK, but what exactly does Testdisk tell you about the partition, is it good or not? I would still try ddrescue. If you get nothing than it means the drive is wiped or there is physical damage.
Since you paid Ontrack I have to assume there is no backup :cry:. Knowing what Ontrack charges it would have been cheaper to just have a backup drive.

Best of luck,
Al

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