How to Restore Data from Spanned Drive?

Updated on May 24, 2023

Summary: Worried about your data on the spanned volume? Wondering how to recover data from spanned volume? Need not worry, this article will help you to recover data from the spanned volume in a hassle-free way. Also, I recommend you try a Hard Drive Recovery tool - Yodot for an immediate recovery solution.

What is Spanned Volume?

A Spanned Volume is a volume where you can use the free storage space of multiple drives by combining them into a single logical volume. For instance, there are two drives left with 50 GB of free storage space each. You decided to combine those free storage spaces into a single logical volume, this is called spanned volume.

Advantages of Spanned Volume:

Increased Storage Capacity - By combining the multiple drives together you can easily increase the storage space and use them. It’s mainly useful when you have multiple drives that have varying storage sizes and you can utilize that free space easily by combining them

Simplicity - You can create and manage the spanned volume easily with the help of a disk management tool in Windows. Unlike creating other volumes, spanned volume is quite simple and easy to create and manage

Ease of Expansion - You can easily expand the size of the volume by adding additional disks to the spanned volume.

Disadvantages of Spanned Volume

Absence of fault tolerance - Spanned volumes do not provide built-in data redundancy like RAID-5 volumes. Thus, if one of the disks in the spanned volume fails it results in data loss or corruption of the entire volume

Limited Performance - Due to the distribution of data across the disks, spanned volume works in a limited performance nature

Disk Management Complexity - Due to the addition of more drives, if you want to configure anything on the volume it becomes complex. Because without impacting data access and integrity you can’t configure the volume.

Source: Reddit

“Recovery of data from spanned volume”

Apologize if this has been asked before. I have a computer with a failed SSD C: drive with Win10 OS. (it asks to be reinitialized to be read, with no capacity info displayed, so I assume it’s more than just a corrupt boot sector). I don’t know if this drive is MBR or GPT so am hesitant to initialize it. The Win10 boot repair says it cannot fix the problem

I believe this machine was upgraded from Win7 and when set up in Win7 there were two small capacity 3.5” HD that were spanned with a single volume. Assuming C: drive is unrecoverable, what is the best way to recover the data on the spanned volume? Individually the drives are not accessible and also ask to be initialized in the disk manager (connected to another computer).

Above the user on Reddit has lost his data from spanned volume and he can’t access his drives to recover spanned drive volume. In the scenarios like this, I recommended you guys use a reliable Hard Drive Recovery tool like Yodot to recover data from spanned volume. Before recovering data we will see the reasons for data loss on spanned volume.

Reasons Behind Spanned Volume Data Loss?

  • Because of MBR and catalogue file corruption, you can’t access the files present on the spanned volume.
  • Accidentally formatting the volume without taking backup leads to data loss on the volume.
  • Make sure that you are not deleting an existing drive while creating a spanned volume.
  • The boot sector virus present on your computer might make the spanned volume inaccessible along with the primary drive.
  • Software malfunction or logical conflicts may eventually result in the loss of complete data from a spanned volume

How to Recover Data from Spanned Volume?

Spanned volume recovery is made easy with the Yodot Hard Drive Recovery tool. The tool is specially designed for data recovery from Volumes/Partitions etc. the advanced recovery algorithm on the software will make the recovery process easy for you.

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Steps for Spanned Drive Recovery by the Hard Drive Recovery Tool:

  • Install the software to recover spanned volume without losing data

  • Click on Hard Drive Recovery → Partition Recovery

  • The tool shows the available drives on the next screen, selects the particular spanned volume later click on Next to recover spanned volume
  • The software starts the scanning process and displays the found drives/partitions, click on the particular drives/partitions and hit Next

  • View the recovered data in Two View Types

  • Preview the recovered files using the Preview option
  • Select Save to save the recovered data in the location of your choice.

Conclusion:

Make use of this article effectively for spanned volume recovery, regular backup of data, and maintaining the spanned volume will reduce the data loss scenario. If you have any queries related to this article please reach out to us.

Frequently Asked Questions:

1. What happens if a drive fails in a spanned volume?

If a drive fails in spanned volume, the data that is written to the drive alone is gone. Other data will be safe. Recover the lost data using reliable hard drive recovery software.

2. Can spanned volume be extended?

Yes, the spanned volume can be extended. For that, the disks which are having free space should be formatted with the NTFS file system.

3. What is the risk of a spanned volume?

The risk in the spanned volume is a disk failure, no automatic data recovery, disk management complexity, etc…