I just want to share my experience with RAID0, EXT2 data recovery, maybe someone else may find this information useful. I like D-Link DN-323 NAS enclosure although it has its own share of problems. I own two units, one I have had for almost two years. I've put 2 500GB drives in it at the time and formated both drives as RAID0, ext2 to get most space out of it.
In a hine sight it wasn't a very good decission. Since drive prices have been dropping stadily I have been planning to upgrade the unit two 2 2-Terabyte drives fomated as RAID1 for safety reasons but I never got around to do it. I have been postponing this until the light on one of the drives turned red. You can guess what that meant.
I turned the unit off and then back on, both light came on green and I felt great sense of relief I started copying the data but after two minutes or so the light on the problem drive went red again and the transfer got interupted in the middle all directories vanished. I checked configuration through a browser and only one drive was visible.
Since I have 2 NAS units I have moved both drives to my second NAS enclosure and same thing happen everything would be fine for about 2 or 5 minutes then one drive would fail light went red and I lost all access. Well that meant that the NAS enclosure wasn't the problem.
My next step was to connect both drives directly to SATA controler on my computer running Windows XP. That allow me to read info on both drives and it seemed that the SATA controller was handling the failing drive better.
Obviously the big problem I faced was how to access the data formated as RAID0 EXT2 Linux partition on a Windows XP system. I have searched and searched and tried different recovey programs. The one that did this for me and helped me recover all >800GB of data was program from R-Tools Technology Inc. called R-Studio.
The program allows you to create virtualRAID block, supporting RAID0 through RAID 6. It also supports NTFS/FAT/EXT2/EXT3/EXT4/UFS/HFS file systems. That is all that is required to access my RAID0, EXT2 formated partition from DNS-323 NAS enclosure. The program costs $80 which I consider money well spend since up until now I didn't have any tool for file recovery. It also doubles when you need to copy files from existing RAID volume to a new bigger system without needing 2 NAS units or copying to local drive first and then back to NAS. In my case this wouldn't be a problem since I have two units, but accessing existing drives directly on my computer transfering them to a new box is much faster.
When setting up the Virtual RAID block it is important to have the right parameters. When you look at the NAS drives in R-Studio it has 3 partitions, two small ones and one big. Big one needs to be selected. It is also important to select them in the right order one with EXT2 format info is first one, fallowed by the bigest partition from the second drive without any info. Then RAID0 type needs to be selected and block size should be set to 64KB, Block order stays at default and number of rows should stay at two. Once all this is set you should be able to access your RAID0, ext2 system directly on your computer and you can start recovering data.
Since this is a data recovery program it should work on corrupted drives and formated drives as well and it can also scan for many file types directly, there is hundreds of file types supported for recovery, too many to list. If you're missing one drive completely you can substitute the drive as missing, it still needs to be done in correct order but it will limit your chances of recovery and I am not rely sure how successful this would be.
From my experience it is possible to recover data from RAID0, EXT2 such as that used by D-Link DNS-323 NAS, hooked up directly two your computer as long as your computer has a SATA controller and you get yourself R-Studio data recovery tools.
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Topic: RAID0, EXT2 Data Recovery (Read 6332 times)