Okay, I TOTALLY screwed up! I hope, beyond hope, someone on here has some magical solution to a total lapse of good judgement on my part. Man, I did the stupidest thing I could manage, I think.
I thought I'd run an erase of my free space on my boot drive, for whatever reason. I have a boot drive, and then four drives connected in a basic striped Raid set (four slices) as my media drive.
I after while I decided to stop the erase operation, as it was taking a long time and the temp file was not letting me carry on with my normal work as it had of course filled my boot drive by this time. I selected cancel (or whatever it says) to stop it, and got the little spinning beach ball. Several minutes later, the ball was still spinning, and so out of impatience I decided to 'Force Quit" the Disk Utility. I think I've tried to do this erase function before and got just as impatient and either force quit it, or the same result occurred maybe my normally let it shut down early.
What happened was it didn't get rid of the temp file and it still showed I had zero space on my boot drive. Having something similar happen, in some fashion, before, I was trying to think how I could now get rid of this temp file. I tried searching for it, but couldn't really find it or know where to look. So I was thinking I'd try to start the erase function again in case it recognized the old temp file as I started the operated and hopefully would delete it.
Here is where I screwed up, totally. Because my drive names are somewhat similar, and because I was a little mentally tired at the time, I inadvertently selected one of my raid slices instead of my boot drive. And in two clicks erased it. I didn't erase the free space, I erased the drive. Or I guess I just reset the table information at the beginning of the drive (I'm hoping this may give me some sort of way out of this mess).
So, in summery, I have three of the four RAID slice images like they were, and the (virtual) raid image is still there (not mountable now), but I have one slice that I erased, or reset as a normal Mac Extended Journaled drive/image.
My problem is that I am a pro photographer (and do some video work) and I had a bunch of things I haven't backed up yet on the media drive and can't replace. I was actually planning on backing them up soon, but what help is planning at this point. I can't tell you how dumb I feel, or i guess numb is a better word.
I noticed a recover file in the trash called "EFTFile1.sparseimage" I'm not sure if that is related, or related to the process of the first erasing process. It is 201.74 GB used. My RAID is made up of 4 X 279.3 drives which was about 1 TB. It was nearly full, so you can imagine how much stuff I had on there. I wanted to back it up, but since I don't have a drive of that size elsewhere I was going to have to be selective about that, which is why I hadn't done it yet. I was trying to pare it down first. My boot drive is 465 GB, and still reads zero space available.
What do you all suggest? Did I just loose tons, and tons of work, some of which I can't recreate again in two clicks? Should I start drinking?
Any help would be VERY APPRECIATED.
Thanks, Craig
Top
