Drive Partition Lost? Data Lost?

Hello.

This is my first post on these forums, and i hope you can help me!

The other day i did a boo boo and I'm afraid I've lost a full 6TB drive of data

The OS is Win7 on the computer in question, and the MB is ASUS P9X79 Deluxe (doubt that matters, but at least i put it in the here).

I picked up a 18TB on sale that i was gonna move over the data from the old drive, and I installed this drive in the space of the cabinet where the full 6TB was, so far so good.

In my cabinet i have a 5,25" hot swap tray that basically has been used for another drive slot for ages, and not really been used as a hot swap bay for a long time.

So after i booted up the PC with the new 18TB drive and formated it to make it ready for use, I pulled out the drive (a 8TB drive) in the hot swap bay (it functions so that when u turn the key to unlock it it kills the power to the drive, and I've done this loads of times back in the day...), and inserted the tray again with the full 6TB drive i removed when PC was shut down.

Firstly i noticed that the computer didn't add the drive letter of the 6TB to Windows Explorer window like it should, but then i also noticed that the drive letter from the old drive in the hot swap bay wasn't removed, and the file structure was somewhat available to me stil (but ofc i couldn't open files)...

I ofc knew something was afoot and did the first mistake of the night (2nd if u count not noticing strait away that the drive in the hot swap bay wasn't removed in my Windows Explorer).

I proceeded to shut down the computer (without removing the hot swap tray, ... The mistake) to check the bios settings.

The MB in question has a "Hot plug" Enable/Disable option for all the drive connections on it, and sure enough they where all set to Disable... Dont know when / how this happen since i know it used to be "Enabled", my best suggestion is that the last bios update did it, but that was years and years ago...

Might also be when i had it without a battery for like a week like 5 years ago when fat-fingered the battery tray and had to buy a new one and solder that on the MB... But anyways the settings where changed...

When i had activated the hot swap settings i booted up the computer the windows chkdsk prompted and wanted to fix a partition with the name of the 8TB drive that was no longer in the computer..... So i ofc canceled this chkdsk action since i didn't want anything to be written to the disk, and windows continued to load.

The partition on the 6TB drive now has the name of the partition of the 8TB drive and windows cant access it and it shows no files...

What i feel happened is that the computer didn't notice/understand the drive swap since hot swap was disabled and when i shut down the computer it wrote onto Master File Table of the 6TB drive thinking it was the 8TB drive and thus updated the MFT on the 6TB drive with data from the MFT of the 8TB drive...

Since i have R-Studio on that old PC i opened that and tried to scan the drive in hopes of... something...

This is from the log :
(i manually canceled the scan after 18min)

"Error Disk 30.12.2023 05:09:52 Read disk O: at position 25057308672 failed after 2 attempts. Data Error (cyclic redundancy check, CRC) (23).
Error Disk 30.12.2023 05:10:07 Read disk O: at position 25059151872 failed after 2 attempts. Data Error (cyclic redundancy check, CRC) (23).
Error Disk 30.12.2023 05:10:21 Read disk O: at position 25060999168 failed after 2 attempts. Data Error (cyclic redundancy check, CRC) (23).
Error Disk 30.12.2023 05:10:34 Read disk O: at position 25061007360 failed after 2 attempts. Data Error (cyclic redundancy check, CRC) (23).
Error Disk 30.12.2023 05:10:48 Read disk O: at position 25062846464 failed after 2 attempts. Data Error (cyclic redundancy check, CRC) (23).
Error Disk 30.12.2023 05:11:03 Read disk O: at position 25064689664 failed after 2 attempts. Data Error (cyclic redundancy check, CRC) (23).
Error Disk 30.12.2023 05:11:15 Read disk O: at position 25066553344 failed after 2 attempts. Data Error (cyclic redundancy check, CRC) (23).
Error Disk 30.12.2023 05:11:31 Read disk O: at position 25068519424 failed after 2 attempts. Data Error (cyclic redundancy check, CRC) (23).
Error Disk 30.12.2023 05:11:50 Read disk O: at position 25070362624 failed after 2 attempts. Data Error (cyclic redundancy check, CRC) (23).
Error Disk 30.12.2023 05:12:03 Read disk O: at position 25070379008 failed after 2 attempts. Data Error (cyclic redundancy check, CRC) (23).
Error Disk 30.12.2023 05:12:04 Read disk O: at position 25072115712 failed. Scan process terminated.
Information System 30.12.2023 05:12:04 Scan has been completed for O: in 18m:14.067s
Warning File 30.12.2023 05:13:32 [FileId: 0] Closing attribute: parsed allocated size (160301056) differ from stored one (320602112)
Warning File 30.12.2023 05:13:32 [FileId: 0] Closing attribute: parsed allocated size (160301056) differ from stored one (320602112)
Error File system 30.12.2023 05:13:32 Unable to open the volume because MFT file is outside disk bounds
Warning File 30.12.2023 05:13:32 [FileId: 0] Closing attribute: parsed allocated size (160301056) differ from stored one (320602112)
Warning File 30.12.2023 05:13:32 [FileId: 0] Closing attribute: parsed allocated size (160301056) differ from stored one (320602112)
Error File system 30.12.2023 05:13:32 Unable to open the volume because MFT file is outside disk bounds"

The "outside disk bounds" supports my thinking that the MFT of the 8TB (or parts of it) is somehow written onto the 6TB drive...

Anyone have any clue if this is somehow reversible? Only option i can see is if the old MFT is stored on the drive and can be recovered or "rollbacked" or something...

IF the MFT cant be recovered, is there a way with software to recover the data on the disk without a working MFT? and if so are we talking expensive professional recovery softer, or even sending in the drive to professionals that does recovery from drive surfaces?


TL: DR

MFT might be overwritten to wrong drive by windows.... recoverable/fixable?


PS. Unsure if this falls under Hardware or Software... Feel its not a "physical hardware" problem, but from other threads, i feel it lands under Hardware....

Anyone with and "lifesaver ideas"?

 

Ha.. I'm in a similar situation on a smaller scale so do sympathise.
You obviously have been using this setup for some time so the most likely reason is a cabinet hot wiring issue but that doesn't help solve the disks access.
If twas me I'd beg steal or borrow a basic PC and put each of Yr drives in on its own then see what happens. A lot of data at risk so don't make drastic changes.. Try and copy off as much data as possible onto an external drive then look at restoring a basic system and take it back to as it was. Good luck

 

Thx, for your response.

The hot swap settings in bios was changed to Disabled for all SATA slots, so not a wiring issue (but the cause is not the important part here).

I've tried the 8TB drive using a a USB docking, and it works fine (when it was disconnected thru the hot swap bay i just experienced a normal loss of power, and nothing was written/ changed on it).

I have yet to try and connect the 6TB drive to anything else via USB docking on strait to SATA, since i first need to work out of it is recoverable without advanced time consuming data extraction... I'm stil in the hopes that the MFT can be saved / recoverd /fixed.... I stil belive that is the cause of the problem...

 

No worries.. I've spent all weekend on my own problem soon understand the pain.
Always difficult to pre judge another's cause.
But going back in time I once installed windows on a multi disk system which worked fine until I removed what I thought was just a data disk.. But windows had spread itself over both disks. Now I always keep just one disk connected if I reinstall windows. Then connect the second.
So can only assume something similar has happened and windows is trying to sort out it's allocation.
Be careful or you could lose a partition. Disk partition utility or similar might help but I wouldn't do anything drastic until all data backed up. Then reinstall. Good luck.

 

This is a pure data disk, and no OS files are involved... win7 is fine on the computer... also non of the data files on the drives are available since the MFT is currently borked...