Recovery of a corrupt ReFS volume

2016-10-11

Question

_{Tuesday, October 11, 2016 8:28 AM}

After an unexpected restart of an ISCSI device the ReFS volume became unreadable (no problem to the NTFS). It appears as RAW partition and clicking on it the "the volume repair was not successful".

I browsed on internet without finding any solution.
Therefore, before reformatting the volume (NTFS this time...) and restore data from tapes, I was wondering if there is a way (even experimental) to try to rebuild the partition table or at least access to the disk.

The volume was used to archive millions of files (25tb) in a complex tree structure, so using recovery software is not an options (unless there is a sw that is also able to rebuild the the directories structure).

Thanks in advance,

All replies (3)

_{Wednesday, October 12, 2016 4:39 AM}

Hi dueddi,

Thanks for your post.

For error “"the volume repair was not successful”, it means that existing operating system is not able to access data on ReFS volume. And based on my knowledge, as ReFS cannot be chkdsk-ed, we may need to employ successful data recovery tools or the fastest way would be recovering from backup.

Here are the threads discuss before, maybe you could take a look.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/12b55468-b556-46ab-96a5-86426a0c9531/recovery-of-corrupt-refs-drives?forum=winserver8gen

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/7abf7f65-1f0f-4766-8894-ae56b85b3700/refs-volume-is-not-accessible-file-system-shows-raw?forum=winserver8gen

Best Regards,

Mary

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_{Thursday, October 13, 2016 11:54 AM}

Hi Mary,

Thanks for your support.
I had read those discussions, but since they were a bit old I hoped there was some new tricks...
Mostly because I would have preferred "to fix" than "to restore".

Anyway I had the chance to tested some recovery sw, and the outcome was that only R-Studio was able to successfully complete the scan of the 25tb.

I also had to attach the iscsi disk to a server provided of more memory (128gb of ram) since the process of the recovery sw were growing up a lot while scanning.

_{Friday, October 14, 2016 1:23 AM}

Hi dueddi,

Thanks for your reply.

>Mostly because I would have preferred "to fix" than "to restore".

As far as I know, I'm afraid for repairing corrupt ReFS volume except the 3rd party software, restore would be the effective way.