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NAS drive failed, recover from other drive?

FleebFleeb has all of the fleeb juiceRegistered User regular
edited August 2018 in Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern
Heyyas!

So, tossing this out in hopes a bigger brain than mine has some juicy knowledge.

My wife does wedding photography, and we've been keeping her stuff on a Blackarmor 220 NAS. Has been working great for a few years now, but one of the drives just failed. She needs to get access to data from the good drive. I have that drive plugged into my PC, I can see the drive and it's partitions in disc management, but I can't assign drive letters or anything. On the partitions the only option is to delete the volume (oh hell no) and on the disc itself the only option is to convert it to a dynamic disc.

Should I convert it? I really don't want to lose the data from this drive. If converting isn't the way to go how would I get access to the data on this drive? I'm assuming it's a linux file system of some kind.

Steam
Fleeb on

Posts

  • wunderbarwunderbar What Have I Done? Registered User regular
    We need a bit more context here. How was the array set up? Raid 0, 1, or JBOD? If it was raid 0 you're screwed. Raid 1 will mean the drive has everything, and JBOD means you'll have, at best, 50% of the data.

    I'm guessing windows can't read the disk because the NAS probably formatted the drive as a linux partition, probably EXT3 or EXT4. windows can't read those naively, so you'll need something that can to read the disk. If you don't have a computer sitting around with linux, you can try creating bootable flash drive with a Linux distro on it, boot your PC to that, and plug in the drive and it should be able to read it. You can then copy it to another drive. That's probably the safest way you have of trying to get the data.

    And when this ordeal is done: start using a proper backup service so you don't have to go through this again.

    XBL: thewunderbar PSN: thewunderbar NNID: thewunderbar Steam: wunderbar87 Twitter: wunderbar
  • FleebFleeb has all of the fleeb juice Registered User regular
    Not 0, made very sure it's raid 1 so all data should be on the disc

    Steam
  • FleebFleeb has all of the fleeb juice Registered User regular
    edited August 2018
    Well I found a couple programs that should allow me to view EXT file systems in Windows, so I'll see if any of those work.

    Fleeb on
    Steam
  • wunderbarwunderbar What Have I Done? Registered User regular
    If it was RAID1 does the NAS not still work with one drive plugged in? It seems odd that the device wouldn't work at all if a drive failed. That's.... the entire point of RAID1

    XBL: thewunderbar PSN: thewunderbar NNID: thewunderbar Steam: wunderbar87 Twitter: wunderbar
  • FleebFleeb has all of the fleeb juice Registered User regular
    I didn't even try it. I heard the clunk of death and powered it down and pulled the dead drive. I'll try it this evening with just the one disc in.

    Steam
  • wunderbarwunderbar What Have I Done? Registered User regular
    yea if the NAS is any good at all it'll still work, but just tell you the RAID has failed and you need to replace a disk.

    XBL: thewunderbar PSN: thewunderbar NNID: thewunderbar Steam: wunderbar87 Twitter: wunderbar
  • AridholAridhol Daddliest Catch Registered User regular
    Put the one disc back in and try to read it.
    I would not try to read it in a separate machine as who knows how the filesystem was setup and permissions and encryption etc....
    Come back if it don't work in the NAS.

  • FleebFleeb has all of the fleeb juice Registered User regular
    edited August 2018
    Oh no, that drive is dead, I'm familiar enough with hardware to know the sound of a dead drive.
    Turns out that yes, the nas works fine on one drive. Also turns out we have an identical nas with identical drives in our stash at work, unused. So I'll just use one of those drives and rebuild the raid array.
    Also found some good cheap bigger drives on NewEgg, so I'll take that unused stash nas and put it into use.

    Fleeb on
    Steam
  • AridholAridhol Daddliest Catch Registered User regular
    haha I meant take the "good" drive out of your machine and put it back in the NAS, not the busted one :)

    Glad you got it sorted and didn't lose any data.

    If it's relevant I use a program called SpiderOak which is a remote backup that supports backing up from mapped drives (many services do not) so it's great to use with multiple computers and a NAS in the mix.

    Now if my house burns down I don't need to worry about the family's entire picture/digital life going up in smoke.

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