[wplug] RAID 5 question on recovery

Chris Romano romano.chris at gmail.com
Thu Sep 4 08:22:34 EDT 2008


On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 11:36 PM, Edward Walter <ewalter at walterama.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>
> 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).
>

I'm not quite sure if it's hardware or software.  From what I read on
the iomega forums, it's formatted to xfs.  I have a feeling that it's
software  RAID.  The problem is that I don't have a machine that
accepts SATA drives.

-- 
"They that would trade essential liberty for a little temporary safety
deserve neither." -- Benjamin Franklin


More information about the wplug mailing list