Data recovery software.

[Twisted]

Can anyone recommend anything decent, had a slight hicup with my NAS a few weeks ago in that it formatted Drive 1 and the mirrored RAID drive decided it would mirror that so I have some formatted drives that need some love to get my damn files back.

[LSM]

Hungry for info. Is it Linux based with an Ext filesystem? Not that I am an expert but it is relevant. Make and model if you are not sure.

[Twisted]

Yeah its Linux EXT its a Netgear ReadyNAs Duo R2000 v2. I've scanned it with a few simple apps (TestDisk) and it finds about 9 Linux Partitions all around 2.88MB and for some reason it finds 2 large partitions one the full size of the drive 1.98TB and on intel partition at 1.85 which is the data I guess its finding the extended and logical partitions (Although not being a Linux guru I'm assuming this based on Windows Partitions and that its the same). I also ran some random tool I found called Data Recovery Wizard which can see the files however it keeps crashing after the 6-8 hour drive scan when I go to recover data

[Twisted]

Well I got it sorted, actually thanks to you LSM I didn't even think that windows FAT/NTFS wouldn't work (DUH) so I just used DiskInternals Linux Recovery and tada all the data is now found (now I get to watch almost 2TB of data get copied very very slowly onto a temporary USB 2.0 external HD)

[LSM]

Yeah it's obvious in retrospect but a lot of people don't get their head around the fact that most NAS boxes (proper ones) have internal processing and it's likely to be Linux based and will almost never use a Microsoft filing system. They should never rely on your PC for processing.

For future reference aside from the things that worked in this instance if you suspect a dud drive and linux tools do not help then remove it from the NAS, hook it up to your Windows PC (some kind of USB to SATA device would be handy) and use SeaTools to give it a good test. It doesn't apply so much to RAID 1 but if you move on to levels 5 or 6 eventually proving or disproving that a drive is duff can prove invaluable (I've just spent 3 weeks doing this to my iTunes NAS).

Good luck recovering the data, no reason it won't go well at this stage.