Western Digital My Book 1TB - Data Recovery
Has anyone have any experience with a NAS gone bad with a RAID setup? I have a friend's MyBook that appears to have two HDDs in RAID 0. If I connect each of the SATA drives to my computer, they work, and I see the partition tables, but the enclosure doesn't get recognized on the network like it should. It just spins up the drives, and no other lights appear.
I'm not that experienced in mounting RAID drives manually, and I'm wondering if getting a replacement enclosure is best or is there a low-risk way to mount it on my Linux PC?
Shaggy posted this at 16:27 — 17th November 2009.
They have: 121 posts
Joined: Dec 2008
I'm by no means an expert, but I believe you'll have a hard time getting data off the drive with anything but the same controller / software that wrote the striping/parity data across the raid array.
Shaggy posted this at 16:28 — 17th November 2009.
They have: 121 posts
Joined: Dec 2008
Err - on reading my own answer - that isn't to say the exact SAME unit - but the same make/model unit...
Cheers,
Shaggy.
pr0gr4mm3r posted this at 22:32 — 17th November 2009.
He has: 1,502 posts
Joined: Sep 2006
Well here is what I ended up doing. I have been working on this on and off since my OP. I am by no means a data recovery expert, but I like me a good challenge.
So the problem is that "Drive A" was failing, which is why the NAS failed to boot up. Here is what the partition table look like on that drive...
The partition tables are the same on each drive, except this one has that alert flag on sdc1. Clicking on that revealed all sorts of errors on the drive. It does have that same error flag on sdc4, but it doesn't even know the partition type, and when I connect "Drive B", it has the error flag on the 4th partition as well. After some reasearch, I learned that they have some proprietary filesystem, which is why it looks like a blob of data.
sdc1, sdc2, and sdc3 are system partitions that the NAS uses to boot up. They are the same on each drive, so in case one fails, the device can still boot up. When I disconnected Drive A, the device booted up, but obviously the data wasn't available. So...here is what I did recover the data (and I must say I feel like a genius).
I searched the model of the drive, and they were luckily still for sale on Tiger Direct, so I bought one. I will call this one "Drive C". I used dd to copy the system partitions from Drive B (good drive) to Drive C, and then I used dd_rescue to copy the data from Drive A (bad drive) to Drive C. So Drive C contained the system data from Drive B and the user data from Drive A. I had to use dd_rescue because there were unfortunately bad sectors in the data partition. I got all but a couple MB. All in all, not bad, but I was concerned it wasn't going to be able to mount the filesystem with the missing sectors.
So once I had my made up Drive C, I put that in place of Drive A and powered up, and...it mounted!! Seeing the list of folders was extremely satisfying. I am still copying the data off it because I have to do it a little at a time. When it hits to what was a bad sector, it locks up. Still, it looks like I am going to get most of it off the drive.
Lesson to learn: Do not use RAID 0 on a NAS unless you have a backup!
Want to join the discussion? Create an account or log in if you already have one. Joining is fast, free and painless! We’ll even whisk you back here when you’ve finished.