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[joejiz]

Hi

Everything was fine (raid 1) 2 TB Seagate drives.  Up for months no problem.
E-mail alerts setup and worked just fine.  

My dad reports his outlook 2003 email inbox is missing information.  ( his pst file is saved on the dlink shared drive). . .

I rdp into his machine and check his shared drive mapped drive.  Sure enough I only show 2 folders instead of a bunch of folders.  I go into the folder where the pst file is a bunch of other files in there are missing.

I check the properties of the mapped drive and it says its only 60 GB.  ?

Ok that is weird.

I log into the webserver for the device and see that hard is blank for left bank.  Ok so  no email alerts or anything.

Nice job of saving the data should a hard drive die!?!?  Maybe his outlook file was open during the time the hard drive died or something.

PS no hibernation is set on drives. So I am not in front of the device. I am province away.

I choose systems - restart

upon reboot I get two emails
1- raid degraded
2- left hdd failed

Ok, I browse the shared drive via mapped drive on windows 7 machine and all the folders start showing up.  And files in the mail folder start showing but the main pst file is 4 gb less still.

When the system came back up DLINK 323 web server said the current hard drive is to small to resync or essentially fix the raid 1.
"The replacement hard drive does not have enough capacity to support the RAID 1 volume. Please insert a hard drive with more capacity."
Any ideas anyone?

Even when I put a new drive and it finishes resyncing the mail file has been used so it's not like it magically will bring back the older file and overwrite the new pst.

We're screwed aren't we.

[ivan]

To answer your last question not necessarily, it depends on what you have done since the drive failed.

Assuming you don't have a backup (any form of RAID is not a backup) and you have not messed about with the good drive you should have all of the data safe on it.

Read through the information contained in the Sticky Topic: DNS-323 - Data recovery (Windows PCs).

It will require that you have physical access to the good drive. 

If all goes well you should get everything back.  I know it works because we tested the recovery that way. 

The only problem I can see is that by your remote access without checking the RAID 1 status you may have forced a partial RAID rebuild from the failed drive to the good drive which would result in the 60GB size report.  If that is the case then R-Studio bay be able to recover more of your data than a simple copy using Ext2IFS.

 

[joejiz]

Hi Ivan,

I don't have a recent backup of the file, the file size should be 4.5 GB and its only 87 MB. 
I will review the Sticky as you suggest.

This is what I believe happened.

1.  Unit running fine, hard drive died
2.  Unit tried to auto rebuild on the fly(as set) but the bad hdd identified itself as 60 GB only.
3.  Windows 7 pc browsed to mapped drive and only showed two folders out of 15.
4.  I right clicked on mapped drive, holy crap what is the 60 gb crap?
5.  Loaded web server ( remember no dlink alerts for failed drive, rebuild or anything ) - never seen this before
6.  Went to status found out on drive failed, degraded raid status.

Actions Taken:
1.  loaded web server , chose restart
2.  Logged back in and the unit on FIRST page said ""The replacement hard drive does not have enough capacity to support the RAID 1 volume. Please insert a hard drive with more capacity."
3.  From windows pc browsed to mapped drive and found more folders being rebuilt.  Quick assessment it appears like "everything else came back"  however I haven't truly verified.  I could dig deeper - used space versus free space formula.

Option 1: Potential new steps:

1. Shut down device
2. get my dad to remove dead hard drive
3. Turn on device
4. Inspect pst file to see if it's fully there ( why wouldn't it be ?)

Option 2:
1. Shut down device
2. Get my dad to remove dead hard drive
3. Insert replacement hard drive of exact model if possible if not choose same manufacture but with more GB.
4. Turn on Device.
5. Log into server
6. Choose auto rebuild and make it happen - somehow not choosing delete both and make raid 1

What do you guys think?  I'll go read sticky.

BTW - > With this exact model type another customer of mine got the alert of dead hard drive and I went in and choose option 2 and it rebuilt perfectly.  So I know the product works.

[ivan]

Correct your Option 2 will work if one of the hard drives is dead.  If on the other hand the the drive is not completely dead (some sectors may be trashed but not all) you will see the drive reporting a smaller capacity as you are.

One thing you should do is to get your father to remove the failed disk and restart the unit.  You then should be able to see what is on the remaining disk and if it has all the data there and it is accessible and the full capacity is shown then it should rebuild the array correctly when a new disk is installed.

If it does not show full capacity and if nothing has been written to that drive there is a very good chance that you will be able to recover it all but it does require you to have physical access to the drive unless you are certain that your father can do the necessary work on his own.

 If ther is any doubt I recommend that you need to try and do the recovery first mainly because we see and have to fix the sort of problems toy are seeing and I always feel that we should have as much of a clients data stored safely should anything go wrong with the RAID rebuild.

The decision is now yours - do you try for a rebuild with a new same size disk or do you try recovery first.

[joejiz]

I will follow the steps of turn off and have him remove the bad drive.
Turn it on then we'll see if the file is 4.5 gb somehow.

The 60 gb disk size was only there the day I first looked at it.  Upon restart it shows the 2TB free space and what appears to be all the data.  However lets try breaking the raid by removing the drive and turning it on.

Quick question, when looking at the unit with the front door in front of you, the left drive is the left drive and the right drive is the right drive?

[ivan]

To answer your question yes, and if the drive has completely failed the LED in front of it will be a sort of pinkish colour and not the standard blue.

[fordem]

The drive LEDs are not a particularly reliable indicator of drive condition or status, and, based on D-Link's documentation, a failed drive will be shown by an amber/yellow LED - experience has shown that with a failed drive you can have no LED, a blue, yellow or pink/purple LED - depending on the nature of the failure.

The LED actually has two sections, one blue, one amber - the pink/purple color is produced by running both sections simultaneously, the actual color seen will depend on the duty cycle - this condition is not documented by D-Link and is NOT indicative of a failed drive as it can be caused by a "full drive".

[ivan]

Thanks fordem for the information on the colours since we have never seen anything other than blue here (no failed drives in the NAS) and our servers use individual LEDs to indicate status of the individual drive.

If I remember correctly you have first hand experience with this and I hope everything is working well for you now.

[fordem]

I do have some personal experience garnered over the roughly six years I owned a DNS-323, it's still sitting on a shelf behind me, even though it no longer boots (either corrupt firmware or failed hardware) - I did have at least one, "live" disk failure, but before actually deploying the unit, I spent a number of weeks, simulating various scenarios, which included inserting "known defective" disks, to see if the unit would detect them as defective (it rarely did) and also "hot unplugging" disks to test RAID rebuilds.

Alas, those tests showed the unit was not ready for "prime time", which disappointed me immensely as I had a number of SOHO clients who could have benefitted from it.

[joejiz]

Thanks Ivan, I will be getting my dad to remove drive when it is off.  Turn back on and we'll see if the .pst file grows in size.  I have a feeling it won't but one never knows.

[joejiz]

Update:

Had the unit off for awhile, he turned it on as he needed a file.

the system started rebuilding, I checked mapped drive(only two folders there) + small pst file there

Systems says sync'ing.  So this is a bit new to me but must of happened previously as this "feels" just the same as a couple times ago.

Next step finish  of sync, turn off and remove the broken hard drive.

[joejiz]

which drive is this:  HDD2 Hard Drive Has Failed  ?

[fordem]

HDD2 is the drive in the left bay when facing the unit.

[ivan]

joejiz, don't be at all surprised if you find most of your data missing when you remove and replace the defective drive.

This is at least the second time the drive has been rebuilt  with a defective drive in the unit.  In such cases it is time to put in a new drive and do a full format of the RAID 1 array and restore from backup.

Anyway, get that damaged drive out of the unit before you loose everything on the good drive. 

As long as the damaged drive stays in the unit and tries to rebuild you are losing data!

[joejiz]

Ok.

I will shut unit down, have him pull the left drive (hdd2 facing it).

Turn it on and see if the file is back.

Will report back after.