Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[mastermayhem]

I had to replace my defective DNS-345 and I attempted to move the discs from the old one to the new one and the only option that I see is "Set RAID type and reformat". I have read from other users in the forum that discs from other Sharecenters have been recognized and simply added to the new configuration. I have updated firmware, downgraded firmware, placed the drives in different slots, but nothing seems to allow me to see the option to simply add the discs to the system.

Previous discs were setup in a RAID1 configuration. They don't appear to be damaged, and are accessible on my PC using DiscInternals Linux Reader.

The issue that I have is that I don't have the free space to temporarily store the data that I can "recover" via the Diskinternals software.

Any thoughts?

[JavaLawyer]

Did you insert the HDDs in the same slot order as the original DNS-345? Legacy ShareCenter models are known to protest if the HDD order is changed. I always write the slot number with a marker on the HDD prior to formatting in the event I have to perform maintenance or HDD swapping.

[mastermayhem]

Yes. They were all marked. Still nothing. I haven't seen any documentation on exactly how to put them into the new box. I had 2 RAID1 sets. Do I place them in with the power on? off?

[JavaLawyer]

As a precautionary measure I would power down before seating the HDDs. My first word of advice would be to make a full backup of your data prior to performing any data/storage manipulation, but that's not an option here. Something you may want to try, and this is of course has its risks, is seating only one of the two HDDs and try powering up. The ShareCenter may see the volume as a degraded RAID-1. Again, you try this at your own risk.

It's possible the Array was damaged by your old unit, as I also read your other thread. Data corruption in just the right place may make the volume unreadable by the ShareCenter, yet recoverable using other mounting techniques.

If all else fails, you may have a recovery option. If you can successfully mount and read one of the two HDDs in a Linux PC, then you can re-format the second HDD in slot-1 of the DNS-345 and simply copy your data from the PC to DNS-345. The risk here is that you're operating without a safety net since you'll be reformatting the only copy.

Once you get all this sorted out, I strongly recommend formatting the two HDDs as Standard Volumes and scheduling a backup job between the two. This approach will mitigate the risk of a failing RAID and will backup your data. RAID is NOT a backup, but rather only offers redundancy. Please see the following posts:

• DNS ShareCenter - RAID-1 is NOT a Backup
  
• DNS-343/345 - RAID-5 is NOT a Backup
  

I should note that if you use Standard Volumes, the DNS-345 backup software can schedule nightly incremental backups, but does NOT have an option to remove files in the backup that are deleted in the source, so your backup volume will grow slightly larger than the source volume over time. I personally use a scheduled nightly backup and run backup software from a PC on my LAN once a month to synchronize the volumes (i.e. delete files in the backup that no longer exist in the source). I have 2 DNS-345 and 2 DNS-343, configured as 16 standard volumes. Working with so many volumes is far more cumbersome than working with a four RAID-5 arrays, but I will gladly trade data integrity over convenience.