Please Help? Possible to recover an Optane-Paired HD?

[HeadRusch1]

I'll keep it simple: I had a system running a 32gb optane chip paired up with a 3TB hard drive.  The system was, essentially, chopped up for parts.....the 3TB drive was unplugged and removed, no software was run to decouple it or disable optane, etc.  System was shut down, parted out, boom, done.

So, I managed to get the drive back, but the rest of the system is unfortunately gone, including the optane stick it was paired to, the MB it was on, etc.

The 3TB drive doesn't show as an external when I try using it via a USB 3.0 adapter, I'm assuming the data is still there but without optane to translate it its not going to work.

Is there any way to get this hard drive back to readable status via windows??  Is there a windows software solution that can make this data visible to windows so I can recover it or is the only way to build a new system with a new optane stick and try to get it to see the drive?

Hoping this data isn't gone for good.  Appreciate any replies.

Thank You

[n_scott_pearson · Accepted solution]

If portions of the file system are being maintained within the Optane module, separating the two without disabling the Optane module (and having these portions flushed to the drive) can result in what appears to be corruption of the file system. You should still be able to see the file system, however; it should not appear to be gone completely. The Optane module is not necessary to "see" the drive (though desirable to recover from this corruption).

...S

[HeadRusch1]

Hi, Thank You for the reply.  

So right now, if I connect that drive to a USB enclosure I can see, in Windows Disk Management, a drive, online, that is shown as Healthy, but it has a RAW file system.  So there is no directory structure to be read, Windows itself doesn't see it, but Drive Manager can see its a device of the correct size in a raw state.

The drive was not formatted, its as it was when it was removed from the PC.  At this point I'm struggling to find next-steps, which if it means building a low-cost computer with a 32gb Optane module just to try and re-discover this drive's contents, I'd probably have to go that route.  But I'm also hoping there is a software solution I can implement short of trying to build new hardware and re-pair it with an Optane module.

Any direction at this point would be most appreciated.  Thank you for taking the time to reply to my initial post.

[n_scott_pearson]

The data you need (as well as some files) is in the Optane memory. Without properly disabling the Optane module (which flushes the cache to the drive), you need both the module and the drive. Without touching the drive contents (don't let Windows initialize it!), recombine it with the Optane module and you may be able to recover it.
...S