[wplug] RAID 5 question on recovery [RESOLVED]

[Chris Romano]

On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 8:22 AM, Chris Romano <romano.chris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

Just wanted to update everyone.  I got the issue resolved.  I got 4
SATA usb enclosures and bought a copy of UFS Explorer.  It's a windows
based app that can read a TON of file systems plus different RAID
types.  I was able to rebuild the array and am coping the files right
now.  It took less than 2 minutes to start pulling data off the
drives.

Chris

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