So last night the Nas4free decided to take up most of my evening trying to figure out why I couldn’t mount an existing UFS formatted drive. This drive had been a standalone UFS drive which lived in my old Nas4free server, it had been working flawlessly since being imported into the HP n36L but had a spaz when I decided to move some drives around.

Long story short, the filesystem can no longer be read by the OS. Can’t perform fdisk or fsck commands. I resorted to UFS Explorer, a program I’ve never used before. I took the 3TB Toshiba drive and plugged into a Windows box running windows 7 and started the scan last night. 14  hours, the filesystem scan had finished and now needs another 30 minutes to find the objects within the filesystem. OMG!!!!

Update: it hasn’t stopped there, there’s a new scan in progress – “File Objects Classification”  – this scan has been in progress for almost 9 hours now with 27 more hours remaining. All of this as a result of moving a couple of drives around for the sake of consolidation. I’ve used Nas4Free for a number of years now and while it has worked flawlessly, as soon as you make some changes, expect the unexpected. I’m not a linux expert, in fact I only know enough commands to navigate my way around the filesystem and move some files around. Most of the time these commands aren’t needed because Nas4free takes care of these tasks with a few clicks.

When searching the net for data recovery from UFS, the top results point to the shareware UFS Explorer so I thought I’d cut my losses and try it, I just didn’t realise it was going to take this long. I’ll update once the scan is finished, hopefully this is the last step in the scan tasks and the next is just to copy the recoverable files into another drive that I have waiting.

There is an excellent write up which is 90% relevant to my situation here –

Data Recovery for Dummies