Recovering from dropped disk with UFS Explorer

[ZaPHoN]

Ok everyone who has been struggling with this one I've found a solution and it worked great for me.

Recovery was on a Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit machine using UFS Explorer Professional Recovery.

DON'T DO THIS ON A NETWORK THAT IS NOT AT LEAST GIGABIT. YOU'LL BE DEAD AND IN A GRAVE BEFORE IT'S DONE on 10/100.


I had two situations

Dropped drive because you were not using a compatible disk (NAS drive). Explanations can be found in this forum that explain why you should never ever use a drive that is not designed for a NAS. Don't do it. Don't run your NAS without a UPS either. You're asking for trouble. System was JBOD on a TS-412 with four drives that were not NAS Drives

The other is dropped drive because of eminent failure. Don't keep running the bad drive until you are absolutely ready to start the recovery. When you do start the recovery always start with the data on the bad drive first because you're running on borrowed time if you're lucky. JBOD on a TS-412 with a bad non-NAS drive

I used UFS explorer Professional in both cases. It's the easiest I've found so far and does a great job at capturing the file structure once you've create a virtual JBOD.

Depending on your computer and the available open SATA slots you may need to get a SATA card. I picked up an internal SATA PCI express CARD with four SATA channels for $30 which is also non-raid. You will also need to grab new drives to backup your data to.


1. Install the card
2. Connect all the drives ( doesn't matter what order)
3. Fire up PC and make sure drivers for card are installed first ( I didn't have to because Windows 7 already had the drivers installed
4. Install UFS Explorer Professional Recovery (easy to find if you can't afford it)
5. Select "Build Raid"
6. Configure to "JBOD"
7. Add your drives in order (DON"T ADD YOUR SYSTEM DRIVES. ONLY THE NAS DRIVES YOU NEED TO RECOVER FROM)
8. Build the virtual RAID.
9. Once you build the virtual RAID you will see "VIRTUAL RAID" on the left where all your drives are. The size is the biggest.
10. Right click on "Virtual RAID" and select "Open File System"
11. You should be able to see the file structure easily now. Simply control click all the files and folders you want to backup and save them to the location you want. I highly advise you do this in small chunks at a time and only what you can't live without.