I've reinserted 4 drives from an old array - is disk slot important in getting volumes to appear?

If you need the data from this volume, let me know, we mau be able to fix this, the SoftRAID partition map is damaged on one or more disks.

I would like to see if I can get the data off. I was going to try to run disk warrior on them but I only see them in the hardware tab of DW and can't do anything to repair.

@paulfrost 

Disk Warrior can only "rebuild" the directory, which means the volume needs to show in SoftRAID and a "disk identifier" present, meaning the volume has been presented to MacOS for mounting.

The issue here is the disks are apparently damaged in a way where SoftRAID does not see the volume, even though the partitions are on the disk.

I will pass this to an engineer for recovery. it may take some time to get it scheduled.

@softraid-support Thank you. I’m grateful for the quick reply and the potential fix. Still the best support I’ve ever encountered.

@paulfrost 

Lets see if we can recovery your volume first! I think we can,depending on what happened, we should be able to reconstruct the partition maps.

Hi. Just checking in to see if there’s been any movement or scheduling for this. If not, is there a typical timeline? Thank you in advance. 

@paulfrost 

I am sorry, we completed this and I had thought I sent it.

I will send it to you from a separate email, as the recovery file cannot be posted here.

Thank you so much for tackling this. The good news is that the recovery file seems to have worked to some extent. There is now a volume that is visible within SoftRaid. However, it will not mount. Before these issues arose, I thought I had 3 volumes on these drives. It's possible I'm misremembering. Is the volume I'm seeing named on the support side? Or would it have been a name they pulled from the support file? I'm curious if this volume is not mounting because of the bad disk and that if simply replacing it would lead to it mounting again. I thought it was a RAID 0 initially, but seeing as how the disks are labelled with primary and secondary labels, I'm uncertain. So I guess the question now is, is there a way to verify the RAID level that is set up on these disks so I can replace the bad disk? Or is there another step I could try before wiping these? I'm still hoping to view the data on the drives. I'm attaching pictures of the current state in SoftRaid, DiskUtility, and DiskWarrior. DiskWarrior seems to think the disks are formatted for Windows/PC.

@paulfrost 

Attach a new support file. I cannot tell anything from screen captures. it appears a volume was deleted on the original support file, let me take a look at where you are now.

@softraid-support

No problem. Attached. Thank you.

@paulfrost 

According to your original support file, you have one volume. It is NTFS, not HFS, according to the support file, so Disk Warrior will not work.

Also, this is RAID 1, mirror. So you have 4 identical disks.

One thing you can do to get running, is initialize two of the disks,  and create a new volume.

then get a data recovery app, like Disk Drill, or R-Studio and scan the volume. R-Studio may be better, as it is used to NTFS.
You do not need all 4  disks to recover data, any single disk will do.

In the meantime, I am creating one more recovery file, in case a tweak we can make might work, but I doubt it will, as it involves the data at the very end of the disks. We will send it in the next few minutes.

@softraid-support Interesting. No luck on the new recovery file. I tried it but something happened where softraid would not quit out. So I restarted and tried to use the recovery file again. It ran into some kind of error and requested restart. So back to the drawing board.

I had been using this enclosure with my PC running windows 10 and MacDrive 10. No recollection of formatting NTFS. I'm now on windows 11 but still have macdrive installed. Haven't been able to get it to mount on the PC either. I have very little knowledge about doing the things you're referring to when it comes to data recovery, but if that's the only road at this point, i guess I'll be heading down it.

I may try to replace the bad drive first and see what that gets me. I assume nothing other than a more functional drive that what's in there, otherwise I assume you would have suggested that. Makes me nervous to initialize anything before attempting to recover data, so I'd like at least some redundancy instead of relying on 1 primary disk and 1 that is predicted to fail. I'll post here if I make any progress.

@paulfrost 

the bad drive is not causing this. I guarantee it, as it has not failed uyet. I recommend "certify" to see if it is actually bad or not, if it is, the unreliable sectors will be marked normal, if it is starting to fial, they will "reallocate"

The file system, if it was not, is now NTFS, when we got the support file. I expect it always was, otherwise some app erased it as NTFS.

Check out R-Studio. it runs on both Mac and Windows. You need to do a full scan, as the volume header/directory pointers are damaged/overwritten.

Since you only need one drive to recover the data, you can start working with the other disks if ytou want, they all have identical (bad) directory/data on them.

good luck!