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[rmiller1959]

Good morning,

We are in the midst of a move, and my network equipment, including the DNS-323, was at the old house when Hurricane Irene hit and our power went out. We also suffered flooding in the basement, although the DNS-323 was high enough in the rack that it didn't suffer water damage, although I'm not sure if there was an electrical problem or not. The unit was unplugged and moved upstairs, where it sat for several days unpowered.

Anyway, I'm at the new house in Virginia and trying to set up my network rack, and when I plug in the DNS-323 and press the power button, I get...nothing. No lights, no fan, no indication whatsoever that it's getting power. I removed the drives and tried to power it up...nothing.

I took the drives out and put them in a dual docking station, and they power up and are recognized by my computer, but I can't read the files.

What are my options for recovering the files? Do I need to buy a new unit and install the drives in it? I was using the JBOD option. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[JavaLawyer]

. . .I took the drives out and put them in a dual docking station, and they power up and are recognized by my computer, but I can't read the files.

What are my options for recovering the files? Do I need to buy a new unit and install the drives in it? I was using the JBOD option. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Ext2Read and R-Studio are two PC applications a number of DNS owners have successfully used to recover (or simply access) their DNS data. DNS users have had a greater measure of success with R-Studio for mounting and reading more complex RAID arrays and JBOD.

[rmiller1959]

I will have to investigate the software solutions you recommend. They are cheaper than replacing the hardware. Thanks!

[JavaLawyer]

I will have to investigate the software solutions you recommend. They are cheaper than replacing the hardware. Thanks!

Ext2Read is free, which is substantially less expensive than new hardware

Not sure if R-Studio has any associated costs. I can say that DNS users have successfully accessed their data with these two products, so assuming your HDDs and volumes are undamaged, the odds are pretty good for recovering your data.

[rmiller1959]

I have the two disks in a USB 3.0 docking station. I presume I should be able to see the files on them using either of the two software solutions you recommended, and the only reason they're not visible in Windows Explorer is because of the ext2/3 formatting of the drives, correct? Does it matter what order the drives are mounted in the docking station since it was formatted as JBOD?

[JavaLawyer]

Correct. The DNS-323 formats HDDs using the Linux file system, so the disks are not accessible by Windows without the help of a third party product.  I don't know if HDD sequence matters for the software, but presume the application will ask for the location of the HDDs you want to mount, in which case you can provide the application with the correct order.

[rmiller1959]

I tried ext2read with limited success. I'm going to download R-Studio and see if it works any better and, if it does, I'll buy it.

[fordem]

I might be wrong, but my guess is that you need too install both drives in a system running linux and use mdadm to "reassemble" the JBOD volume.

If you lack the knowledge to do that, and you value the data, you're probably better off buying a new DNS-323 and inserting the drives.

[JavaLawyer]

I tried ext2read with limited success. I'm going to download R-Studio and see if it works any better and, if it does, I'll buy it.

I recall reading that users had greater success with R-Studio when it came to JBODs.

[JavaLawyer]

Were you able to recover your data?

[rmiller1959]

Sorry for the delayed response. I've been moving!

I recovered a significant number of files, probably the majority of them, but I don't know if I recovered them all. My recollection of what was stored on those drives isn't that precise. I've thought about purchasing a new D-Link NAS for the drives, and the $99 price I found for a DNS-320 is attractive. Would the drives be read the same by the DNS-320 as they were by the DNS-323?

[JavaLawyer]

I found a post on this subject posted by D-Link here.

Summarizing the post: it looks like RAID 1 is "NOT" transferable, but Standard Volumes and JBOD "ARE" transferable. Good news for you "if" this is true. Please see the post on the link above.  

[rmiller1959]

Thank you for once again coming to my rescue!

[JavaLawyer]

Just be mindful of the information in the referenced post and make sure you have a backup of your data before moving forward.

[rmiller1959]

Just to close the loop, I couldn't get the DNS-320 to read the drives from my old DNS-323 "as is", even though they were JBOD and not RAID. Since I'd already recovered a good number of files from the drives using R-Studio, I just went ahead and reformatted them so I'd have a functional NAS device again. It's a good lesson to learn, however, to have a backup of your backup (grin)!

Fortunately, we didn't store critical files on the device, and we used it mostly to share files between computers on the network, meaning most of them were downloaded from the NAS to someone else's computer. Since I don't know if the restored files and folders represent all of the ones that were actually on the drives, ignorance is bliss!

Thanks to JavaLawyer, who's been a great help throughout this process!