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Forum Discussion
Failed to activate encrypted volume
Hello. For a long time I've been runnning my readynas on a single disk using the build in encryption. I felt it was time to change the drive and decided at the same time also add a bit of safety so I ordered 4 new disk with the plan of using RAID 10. I couldn't find any information on how to migrate from one disk to 4 new disks in RAID 10 so after a lot of testing, and searching online without any success I decided to remove the old drive and install the new 4 drives, format them with encryption and all that.. 4 dats later when the dives had finally synced up (why do they even need 4 days to sync when they're brand new and formatted I do not understand). I decided to hook up the old drive over USB as I thought the ReadyNAS would be able to handle that.. no success. It detected the drive but didn't understand what it was. I guessed it was due to the encryption so I thought "no worries, my data is still safe on the drive. I can just remove the new 4 drives and install it again to get access to my data". So I installed it and booted up, the start took forever as it got stuck halway through reading the encrypted disk but after a long wait it continued... and apparently I was wrong about my data being safe! ReadyNAS refuse to mount it with messages such as:
"Failed to activate encrypted volume data-0. Insert an external storage device with the encryption key for this volume and reboot to activate the volume data-0."
Something else weird is that it now indentifies the drive as data-0 rather than data, could that be part of the reason why it won't activate?
And yes, I do have the activation key on a USB drive connected.
What can I do? I've even tried SSH in to to it and using cryptsetup as someone suggested readynas uses LUKS. But cryptestup wont' recognise it as a valid LUKS drive.
Any idea what to do next?
8 Replies
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Welcome to the Community!
Is the Old drive encrypted as well? if it is, using the the key it has before you created the new RAID should be used. It is also not possible for Windows or Mac to show the data from a RAID drive. You will have to use a Recovery Software or Linux to do some script and mount it.
Expanding your RAID array from 1Disk to 4Disk would be as easy as adding a drive one by one until it finishes re-syncing. Was the old disk with the latest OS6 FW before you created the new array?
If the old drive was not encrypted, putting it back to a PC and running software like ReCLAIMe may work.
HTH
Hi and thanks,
Yes the old drive is encrypted and I have the key on a thumbdrive attached. It just refuse to unlock it. Like I said if I try booting with the old drive it get stuck in the encrypt stage for a long time (usually around 37-45%) before going online. Once it's successfully booted up the admin page says
"Failed to activate encrypted volume data-0. Insert an external storage device with the encryption key for this volume and reboot to activate the volume data-0."
I was using latest OS6 on the old drive as well.
"You will have to use a Recovery Software or Linux to do some script and mount it."
Any link to where to read up on this? I can't really find any information on this or even reliable information on what type of encryption ReadyOS use to encrypt the dive. Best guess is LUKS but it's not recognised as a LUKS drive.
nenenet wrote:
And yes, I do have the activation key on a USB drive connected.
Maybe obvious, but perhaps worth checking...
This is the original activation key? Or did you use the same USB drive when you encrypted the new RAID-10 array?
The OS partition that the NAS boots from is on the hard drives. So the only variables here are the encryption key and the health of the old disk.
If you have another copy of the key, perhaps check it.
nenenet wrote:
(why do they even need 4 days to sync when they're brand new and formatted I do not understand).
RAID creates a virtual hard disk that runs underneath the file system. It needs to sync all sectors (whether they are used by the file system or not).
Hi, yes. I've tried copying over the key multiple times to the USB. Even tried renaming it to data-0.key instead of data.key due to ReadyNAS now reporting the drives name as "data-0"
I used the disk just prior to swapping to the new drives so the health should be good.
nenenet wrote:
Hi, yes. I've tried copying over the key multiple times to the USB. Even tried renaming it to data-0.key instead of data.key due to ReadyNAS now reporting the drives name as "data-0"
It's calling it that because it's not able to mount it. No need to rename the key.
Was the NAS powered down when you removed the drive?
Maybe download the log zip file, and see if there is more information in there on what's going on.
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