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I had just recently bought a Fantec QB-35US3R to have a nice box on my desk to make some backups to. Along with the HDD-Bay I had ordered some 4TB HDDs to let them run in Raid 5, which is handled by the hardware RAID controller of the Fantec HDD-Bay. The QB-35US3R arrived a few days before the hard drives, so I got impatient and had the idea to put three old 1TB disks in the Fantec device, just to test it... Long story short: I made a backup of the most important data on these three disks before they broke. I had set the configuration scheme to RAID 3 at the Fantec device.

It seems, that the Fantec RAID controller has "somehow" destroyed the partitioning scheme or the file system, because when put into a HDD docking station, they get recognized by the OS (Ubuntu/Linux) but are not mountable anymore.

I tried to recover the data from one HDD via gParted (parted), which ran some hours without success. Here I stopped, before trying other tools, cos I read that the longer a hard drive is running after a the partitioning got destroyed, the worse it gets.

What could the HDD-Bay probably have done to my lovely hard drive disks? Is there some routine a RAID controller is executing, when it wants to create a RAID system? Like erasing the partition table (seems not plausible to me.) or writing some information to every hard drive in the RAID (seems more likely to me.)? Is there a chance to recover the data from these HDDs, or is the change a RAID controller makes so significant, that no software is of help?

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  • I decided to run TestDisk 6.13 at the least valuable hard drive and it worked! TestDisk found all the files remaining on the corrupted HDD. It would still be of interest, what a RAID controller is actually doing to a HDD, that it is not mountable any longer afterwards.
    – Senkaku
    Commented Oct 23, 2013 at 21:54

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Hardware RAID needs some place to store the raid metadata and it usually uses the first blocks of the disks for that. Unfortunately this is the place where the old partitioning data resided, so it is now gone. If the first partition starts at very low blocks the start of the filesystem got damaged too.

Additionally a RAID system might sync drives immediately at setup time. Then all data is lost or with raid 1 the data on the 2nd drive is lost.

If it didn't sync and there was enough space before the first partition then just recreating the partition scheme should be enough to recover the data.

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