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Author Topic: Help! I lost my RAID array.  (Read 6753 times)

computerguy10

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Help! I lost my RAID array.
« on: January 26, 2010, 08:36:30 AM »
Hello Everyone.

I ran into what I think is a big problem. Last night I could not access the files on my DNS-323 anymore. So I logged into the web interface to see if I could find anything wrong. As soon as I logged in, it is asking me to select my RAID level. If I choose any of the levels, it then alerts me that the drives will be formatted which I don't want to do. Is there anything I can do to get my RAID array back?

I am running RAID 1 with 2 160GB hard drives with the latest firmware on my DNS-323. Also when I was looking through my e-mails, it appeared that I got an alert on January 16th saying that 1 of the drives had failed.

Any suggestions would be helpful. Even if I could just access to drives to pull the data off them that would help out a lot.

Thanks in advance!
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fordem

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Re: Help! I lost my RAID array.
« Reply #1 on: January 26, 2010, 02:37:01 PM »
You can try putting one of the drives (or both, one by one) in another computer running either linux or Windows with the ext2ifs installable file system driver.
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RAID1 is for disk redundancy - NOT data backup - don't confuse the two.

krenkey

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Re: Help! I lost my RAID array.
« Reply #2 on: January 26, 2010, 03:24:07 PM »
Just put in another drive of the same size and have the raid rebuild
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gunrunnerjohn

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Re: Help! I lost my RAID array.
« Reply #3 on: January 26, 2010, 03:25:36 PM »
If only one drive was bad, the data would still be available, so this probably isn't going to work.
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krenkey

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Re: Help! I lost my RAID array.
« Reply #4 on: January 26, 2010, 06:09:26 PM »
He said one of his drives failed, why cant you just replace the bad drive and rebuild the array isnt that what its supposed to do ?
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JavaLawyer

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Re: Help! I lost my RAID array.
« Reply #5 on: January 26, 2010, 07:59:31 PM »
Quote from: krenkey on January 26, 2010, 06:09:26 PM
He said one of his drives failed, why cant you just replace the bad drive and rebuild the array isnt that what its supposed to do ?

Even if one drive failed, the second should still be available without rebuilding.  Mounting the drive on a linux box is probably the safest method to try accessing the data.
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computerguy10

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Re: Help! I lost my RAID array.
« Reply #6 on: January 26, 2010, 08:07:03 PM »
Thanks for the replies guys.

I tried hooking up both the drives to a Ubuntu system and I was not able to see the data, I can see the partitions but can't access them. The only partition that I can access on either drive is a 523mb partition called backup, which contains no data.

I have also tried installing just one drive at a time on the NAS, when i try to access the NAS with only 1 drive, I cannot see any volumes, just the shared printer and webpage volume.

I also tried inserting a new drive of the same size along with one of the old drives and went through the steps of rebuilding the array, although at the end it came up with a new name called Volume_2. After this completed I still could not see Volume_1 or 2 through the network share.

I'm afraid to try anything else as I don't want to lose the data that was on the drives(although I feel like it has already vanished).

Any other suggestions? Or free third party software I could use to recover the data?

Thanks in advance
« Last Edit: January 26, 2010, 08:10:32 PM by computerguy10 »
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fordem

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Re: Help! I lost my RAID array.
« Reply #7 on: January 27, 2010, 04:25:24 AM »
Is it safe to assume you know enough about Unbuntu & linux to properly mount the drives and access them?  Personally, I don't, but ext2ifs has worked for me.
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RAID1 is for disk redundancy - NOT data backup - don't confuse the two.

gionn

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Re: Help! I lost my RAID array.
« Reply #8 on: February 19, 2010, 04:36:36 PM »
The drive will not get automounted by ubuntu because the partition is flagged as linux_raid.
You should mount it manually with something like 'mount -t ext2 -o ro /dev/sd?? /media/usb'
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computerguy10

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Re: Help! I lost my RAID array.
« Reply #9 on: February 19, 2010, 07:14:20 PM »
I wasn't able to mount the filesystem from either drive. Both drives lost their file table. I tried just about everything and every piece of software. Even forensic software. Finally I came across a piece of software from a company called Nucleus Data Recovery. Their software is called Kernel Linux Data Recovery Software. Worked like a charm, I recovered nearly every file including the file names and directory structure. Best $50 I ever spent. I'd recommend it for anyone in my situation.

Thanks for your help on this matter guys.
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