.. I think I made a huge mistake.

Hi,

I'm a wedding photographer, and recently decided that I wanted to put all my drives into one box rather than having a bunch of boxes sitting around. I bought a HFR2-S3B -- Opened it up, set it to JABOD (Raid 0 Spanning) -- and threw in all my HDDs with my weddings on them... thinking that they would just all show up as a bunch of drives.. well... I turned the box on, it started flashing "rebuilding" for about 5 minutes and then OS X poped up "this disk needs to be initialized"..

I had a small heart attack, pushed ignore, and took the drives out, put them back in each of their external cases, and now none of them will mount...

...I'm sick to my stomach right now, I really hope I've not lost all the data, else It's gonna be a nasty nasty expensive process for me.

Any help would be much appreciated.

It sounds like you hosed all the drives. Sorry.

I would have hoped that most people would know by now to take the precaution of backing everything up before doing anything like this--especially if it involves your livelihood.

When you set your array to span, your system reads all the physical drives as a single drive and as such needs to reformat ALL of the drives in order to make that happen. Actually, most RAID controllers insist that you reformat all the drives to their own specifications in order that they perform correctly no matter which RAID type you choose.

I don't know if there is any means to 'un-format' your drives, but you might be able to find some software that is able to pull some of the data off your drives.

BTW: to the forums.

Would it not have just re-written the partition table, I can't imagine it would have zeroed 4 2TB drives in under 5 minutes... ?

you can try a program called photorec , i have used it on ubuntu linux to recover a bunch of pics from my sisters memory card.

you will need new drives to recover the stuff to.

No way the data should be lost since you haven't written new data to the drives or forcefully zero'd the drives out. Plenty of data recovery software out there to try for free before purchasing, but I don't use Mac based PC's to have a specific recommendation. Good luck.

http://www.bing.com/search?q=Free+Data+Recovery+Software&FORM=R5FD
ive recovered drives before but not recently.... you can do it

JBOD isn't RAID. JBOD is "Just a Bunch Of Disks". If you put 3 250GB drives into a JBOD array, the OS will see it as one 750GB drive, rather than 3 individual drives.

It's similar to RAID0 in that 3 250GB disks will get you a 750GB drive in the OS, but with RAID0, it writes in stripes to each drive: 64k to drive 1, 64k to drive 2, and 64k to drive 3, then back to drive 1 for the next 64k, for increased speed. The drives, while seen by the OS as a single drive, are still working independently (though cooperatively). In JBOD, they're not cooperative. Disk 2 and 3 just sit there doing nothing until disk 1 is full, then data gets written to disk 2, and finally once both disk 1 and 2 are full, disk 3 starts getting used.

Turn off the JBOD setting, and the OS should be able to find the drives again. The data should all still be there, you just need a partition recovery tool. photorec (as stated in a previous post) is a good one. I think SystemRescueCD includes it.

petteyg359 said:

JBOD isn't RAID. JBOD is "Just a Bunch Of Disks". If you put 3 250GB drives into a JBOD array, the OS will see it as one 750GB drive, rather than 3 individual drives.

It's similar to RAID0 in that 3 250GB disks will get you a 750GB drive in the OS, but with RAID0, it writes in stripes to each drive: 64k to drive 1, 64k to drive 2, and 64k to drive 3, then back to drive 1 for the next 64k, for increased speed. The drives, while seen by the OS as a single drive, are still working independently (though cooperatively). In JBOD, they're not independent.

Turn off the JBOD setting, and the OS should be able to find the drives again. The data should all still be there, you just need a partition recovery tool. photorec (as stated in a previous post) is a good one. I think SystemRescueCD includes it.

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^^^ Out of all the post in this thread this is the only one with valid and useful information.

Sent the drives in to data recovery this morning, I'll let you know what comes of it.

They are a little worried that the raid may have taken all the data and thrown it across all the drives rather than just removed partition tabes or something... I dunno.. either way, we'll know by wed.

LIterally threw up with worry, not sleeping....

...fml to the max.

Drive Genius, or ProSoft Data Rescue 3 which arent free but have had good results with.

you may also want to try forums like discussions.apple.com or forums.macrumors.com for possibly more mac specific solutions if it was done on OSX

mbigna said:

It sounds like you hosed all the drives. Sorry.

I would have hoped that most people would know by now to take the precaution of backing everything up before doing anything like this--especially if it involves your livelihood.

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