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I have a 2TB SAN formatted with NTFS which was accidentally connected on two hosts simultaneously, and when I browse files from both nodes, I see some test data that I created when I originally setup the SAN. Now, I can access my files through a network share, but I really fear to lose everything if the machine gets rebooted or if I disable the network share. I tried "testdisk" which does not really help. I'm backing up the data on an extra drive through the network share, though I'm wondering if there is anyway to fix the MFT. I'm also curious about the reason why I can still see the "right" data from the network share and not locally.

MatthieuP
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Yikes! That's a mess.

The situation you created, by mounting the volume on two hosts simultaneously, isn't a condition that I can imagine that Microsoft has incorporated in tools like CHKDSK (especially in Windows Server 2003). I would strongly recommend that you format the volume before copying the data back. You've put the filesystem into a really oddball state that, frankly, I wouldn't trust in the future.

How can you still access the data remotely, but not locally? That's a mystery to me. The NTFS driver should be presenting the same metadata to the LanManServer service that's being presented to user-mode programs running on the server. Not having access to the code it's difficult to say for sure.

(I almost wonder if you're seeing a cached copy of the data from the Offline Files cache of a client, too. There's not enough information in your question to know, but that's a plausible scenario for your continued access to the data, too.)

Evan Anderson
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  • Thanks for your reply, that's what I was going to do anyway. Just to add some more infos, I don't think that's some cached data which I see: I can connect new clients and access files which weren't accessed for years... – MatthieuP Oct 29 '14 at 15:07
  • @MatthieuP - You've got a strange one here, to be sure. – Evan Anderson Oct 29 '14 at 15:08