[wplug] RAID 5 question on recovery

Edward Walter ewalter at walterama.com
Wed Sep 3 23:36:18 EDT 2008


Does this model of Iomega NAS do hardware RAID or software RAID?  A lot 
of these types of devices just use Linux software RAID for redundancy.  
If that's the case with your device, you could just put the disks in 
another system, activate the RAID set (using mdadm etc) and mount the 
volume.  A good quick way to check this is to pull one drive, put it in 
another machine and do an `fdisk -l' on it.  If the partitions show up 
with Id of "fd" it's a good indicator that your NAS is using software 
RAID (and the RAID set should be portable across machines).

Good luck.

-Ed

Chris Romano wrote:
> I have an Iomega NAS with 4 SATA drives configured in RAID 5.  The box
> seems to have died but the drives still spin and seem to working fine.
>  Because it's a NAS box, there aren't any communication ports other
> than the NIC so I have no way of figuring out what is going on.  I've
> talked to Iomega and they are going to ship me out a new box but I
> need to recover the data that are on the drives.  This because runs a
> version of linux ... not sure what kernel or anything.  Any chance
> that I could hook these drives up to a RAID controller and get at the
> data?
>
> BTW ... I know people are going to say that regular backups should
> have been done ... it was being backed up. However, the backup failed
> the last few days.  So it was kind of like a perfect storm to loss
> data.
>
> Thanks,
> Chris
>
>   


More information about the wplug mailing list