Recover data from Dynamic Disk (MBR) bigger than 2TB
- by Helder
Here is the situation: Promise Array FastTrak TX4310 with 3 disks (750 GB each) in RAID5. This comes to around 1500 GB of data.
Last week I had the idea of expanding the RAID with an additional 750 GB disk. This would bring the volume to around 2250 GB. I plugged the disk and used the Webpam software to do the RAID expansion.
However, I didn't count with the MBR 2TB limit, as I didn't remembered that the disk was using MBR instead of GPT and I didn't check it prior to the expansion.
After a couple of days of expansion, today when I got home, the disk in Windows disk manager showed the message "Invalid disk" and when I try to activate it, it says "The operation is not allowed on the Invalid pack".
From what I figured, the logical volume on the RAID expanded, and passed that info to the Windows layer and I ended up with an "larger than 2TB" MBR disk.
I'm hopping that somehow I can still recover some data from this, and I was wondering if I can "rewrite" the MBR structure back to the 1500 GB partition size, so I can access the partition in Windows.
Right now I'm doing an "Analyse" with TestDisk, as I hope the program will pickup the old 1500 structure and allow me to somehow revert back to it. I think that even though the Logical Drive in the RAID is bigger than the 2TB, I can somehow correct the MBR to show the 1500 GB partition again. I had a similar problem once, and I was able to recover the data using a similar method.
What do you guys think? Is it a dead end? Am I totally screwed because there is the extra RAID layer that I'm not counting? Or is there other way to move with this?
Thanks all!
