Solved - Non-allocated disk after storage reboot

[atlantex]

Hello everybody,

I'm currently avaluating the starwind iscsi solution. I i had the system running for about two weeks now. Yesterday, I had to reboot the system in order to install the latest Windows updates.

After the system came up again I noticed that the iscsi drive doesn't came back again at my Windows 2008 client. A short look into the Windows iscsi config told me the the connection is up and connected.

Then i looked into the disk manager, there the drive is available, but it's marked as non-allocaded disk.


What can I do to get back the NTFS SCSI in Windows? Or are the data lost in such situation?


Constellation:

- Windows 2008 standard as Starwind ISCSI base, Raid 5 for disk E, 1 TB ISCSI Device inside E.
- Windows 2008 enterprise as ISCSI Client, the 1 TB disk has the ntfs format (now non-allocated in disk manager)


thanks,

Daniel

[Max (staff)]

Hi Daniel,
I'm mostly sure that the data has been lost due to a NTFS header corruption, could you please run an NTFS recovery utility on the partition you're attaching over iSCSI?

[atlantex]

Hello Max,

thanks again for your support, I could solve the issue and get back access to the device by the following steps.

As you mentioned, the partition table has been destroid, this happends after restart for installing Windows updates. I guess due to the read/write process, compared with the restart of the the system, the partition table got corrupt.

So first, when I mounted the device via the Windows build in ISCSI connector, the device was recogniced as non-allocaded-disk, so all the data seems to be lost. Now we need to rebuild the partition table as we do(try) it on standard harddrives in case the partition table gets broken.

So I desiced to use the tool testdisk, available here: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

1. Make a backup of the existing starwind image file. just in case...
2. Mount the device via the standard Windows ISCSI Initiator, the disk will come up as non-allocaded-disk in Windows diskmanager.
3. Run Testdisk, I have choosen the folloning options:
3.1 Choose: no log
3.2 Systems present drives show up, choose your Starwind disk (must be visable here, otherwhise check ISCSI mount and Windows diskmanager) and hit Proceed.
3.3 In this screen you have to choose the partition table type, in my case it's option 2 (EFI/GPT), hit ENTER
3.4 On this screen start Analyse.
3.5 On this screen start Search. After some seconds, you should see a green line with partition information. Here just hit ENTER and then WRITE on the next screen, confirm the write action with Y.
3.6 Close Testdisk
4. Go back to Windows diskmanager and switch the non-allocaded-disk offline (right click -> offline)
5. Switch the non-allocaded-disk back online (right click -> online) and after some seconds the partition should come up in the known state, try to access your data via Explorer.

Hope this helps someone one day.

all the best,

atlantex

[Max (staff)]

Thanks Atlantex,
I really appereciate your feedback!