3

I've got a bit of an issue that I'm hoping you can help me with.

I have an Iomega ix4 as my NAS. This runs Linux and each drive in the box has 2 partitions: one for the OS and RAID info, and the second for the actual data. I had it configured as RAID5.

Recently one of the drives failed. At this point all of the data was available, it was just reporting a failed drive.

I had a drive of the same capacity (although not the exact same spec) which I swapped in place of the failed drive.

It recognised it, and started to rebuild the data protection. So far so good ... or so I thought.

The next day, after data protection had finished reconstructing, the NAS was telling me that 4 new drives had been added, and wanted confirmation to overwrite the data. Obviously I declined to do this.

I swapped the failed drive back in again, in the hope that it would return to its previous state of the data being accessible, but one failed disk. However it didn't - it still tells me that the NAS has 4 new drives in it.

I am hopeful that the actual data is untouched, so what I need to do is get it to rebuild the RAID without touching the data on the disks.

I have ssh access, and have run stuff like mdadm --examine to see what I can find. The mdadm.conf file has no entry in the "definitions of existing MD arrays" section.

I have not run any actual rebuilding commands as yet, because this is entering an area which I am out of my depth in.

Please can someone advise the best way of getting my data? Thanks.

Improve this question
2
  • 1
    Before you try anything else: Do you have up to date backups? If not first make a full copy of the drives. Then attempt to restore.
    – Hennes
    Nov 6, 2012 at 23:30
  • I would recommend you DD all the drives to new drives before you continue. This way, you can work with the good copies of your data. In some cases, DD can actually pull the exact drive image, bit for bit, off the drive that crashed, and putting that DD'd drive in place of the crash one resolves the issue (so long as all the drives are the same size/speed). If not, you may need to DD all your drives into 1 big drive/NAS to assure all the data is viable, then rebuild the crapped out NAS.
    – CIA
    Feb 23, 2013 at 19:51

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
0

Unfortunately it doesn't look like the device will revert back to thinking it only has (1) failed drive so this is going to get a little ugly/tricky, but I think you can still recover your data. First I would do as Hennes suggested and make copies of the drives, you can use pretty much any imaging software for that, ghost, acronis, something open-source. Then I would hookup the drives to a PC and run RuntimeSoftware's NAS Data Recovery software.

I've done this the long way by using their Captain Nemo, RAID Reconstructor, and GetDataBack softwares but the new NAS Data Recovery sounds like a more integrated option. Good luck to you.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .