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Hard drive not explorable


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Apologies if this is in the wrong section but it seemed as good as any.

 

Ok, so I've just upgraded my NAS unit and disks.  All seemed good until I discovered that some folders had mysteriously disappeared.  No fear, I thought, as I still have the 2 drives I swapped out with the original folders still on them.  I plug one in to my rig and the BIOS happily acknowledges it's existence.  Windows 10 however seems less sure of itself.  Disk Management shows it with all it's partitions, volumes, etc, but the drive just isn't explorable.

 

The unit was a Synology DS212J and the drives are WD20EARX.

 

So, is this a Windows 10 issue, some kind of proprietary software that Synology used when in the unit or something else I've overlooked?

 

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Cheers

 

James

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Edited by AmazingGecko
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First thing you can try is to right-click on the 1858 GB partition and see if you can assign a drive letter to it.

 

Otherwise, open an elevated command prompt and run these and post results.

 

diskpart

list disk (note the disk number the 2TB disk shows up as)

select disk # (select the 2TB disk)

list part

list vol

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Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.10240]
© 2015 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.10240

Copyright © 1999-2013 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: THOR-PC

DISKPART> list disk

  Disk ###  Status         Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
  --------  -------------  -------  -------  ---  ---
  Disk 0    Online          223 GB      0 B        *
  Disk 1    Online         1863 GB   129 MB

DISKPART> select disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> list part

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Primary           2431 MB   128 KB
  Partition 2    Primary           2048 MB  2432 MB
  Partition 3    Primary           1858 GB  4608 MB

DISKPART> list vol

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
  Volume 0     C                NTFS   Partition    222 GB  Healthy    Boot
  Volume 1                      FAT32  Partition    100 MB  Healthy    System
  Volume 2                      NTFS   Partition    450 MB  Healthy    Hidden

DISKPART>

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OK do this next and past output.

 

sel disk 1

detail disk

sel part 1

detail part

sel part 2

detail part

sel part 3

detail part

 

Have you tried right-click on each of the 3 partitions in Disk Management to see if you can assign a letter? You can even try it manually in Diskpart, example:

 

sel disk 1

sel part 3

assign

 

Were these disks in a RAID array in your NAS?

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Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.10240]
© 2015 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.10240

Copyright © 1999-2013 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: THOR-PC

DISKPART> sel disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> detail disk

WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0 ATA Device
Disk ID: 0004EE1C
Type   : ATA
Status : Online
Path   : 1
Target : 0
LUN ID : 0
Location Path : ACPI(_SB_)#ACPI(PCI0)#ACPI(SAT0)#ACPI(CHN1)#ATA(C01T00L00)
Current Read-only State : No
Read-only  : No
Boot Disk  : No
Pagefile Disk  : No
Hibernation File Disk  : No
Crashdump Disk  : No
Clustered Disk  : No

There are no volumes.

DISKPART> sel part 1

Partition 1 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> detail part

Partition 1
Type  : FD
Hidden: Yes
Active: No
Offset in Bytes: 131072

There is no volume associated with this partition.

DISKPART> sel part 2

Partition 2 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> detail part

Partition 2
Type  : FD
Hidden: Yes
Active: No
Offset in Bytes: 2550136832

There is no volume associated with this partition.

DISKPART> sel part 3

Partition 3 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> detail part

Partition 3
Type  : FD
Hidden: Yes
Active: No
Offset in Bytes: 4831838208

There is no volume associated with this partition.

DISKPART> sel disk 1

Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> sel part 3

Partition 3 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> assign

There is no volume specified.
Please select a volume and try again.

DISKPART>

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Your NAS has Linux??? Even so, shouldn't it handle Windows partitions as well?

Well, I think that was bourne out by my original issue - Windows sees the partitions and their properties but can't read the file system therein.  It can't even assign a drive label.

 

Anyway, I did look at that open source project earlier.  It looks like it's in continual development and not a full release and as I'm paranoid about losing my data I think I'm just going to put the drives back into the original NAS unit which I still have fortunately.

 

Why isn't life ever simple?!? :crazy:

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The partition detail tells us what state they are in. All 3 are marked hidden, with MBR type FDh/0xFD.

 

0xFD for raid autodetect arrays

https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Partition_Types

 

This is the main reason why you can't see the contents from within Windows. Your common Windows partition (such as your C drive) is MBR type 07h. You can change this with Diskpart, however I do not know how safe that is.

 

Linux RAID superblock with auto-detect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_type

 

This wiki page says that FreeDOS may be able to read these partitions. :unsure:

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Actually here there are 2 (two) concurrent issues:

#1 a set of disks originally set in RAID 1 through a dedicated hardware (the Synology NAS) may have unmountable/invalid (under Windows) Partiion ID's (such as the mentioned FD's)

#2 the filesystem used may have not an available filesystem driver in Windows (as it is probably but not definitely an Ext2/3/4)

 

Point is that you do not really-really need to mount the volume(s) at all, what you actually need is to access (Read Only) the files/folders you discovered missing from the new disks.

 

To do this you can try using a "recovery" tool like DMDE:

http://dmde.com/

which should allow you to retrieve the files you are interested in without actually mounting the filesystem or installing any driver.

 

jaclaz

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