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Forum Discussion
Help with how to replace a failing disc
My ReadyNAS has been running for a long time now with 4x 2TB drives in an X Raid configuration. I am getting warning messages which indicate that one of the drives could be about to fail. Is re...
Interesting that someone else has experienced a failing disk in a two disk ReadyNas Duo system. I just ordered two new drives after getting three successive messages that one of the disk was failing. As soon as the disks arrived, I inserted one in drive 2 and the unit began to sync the new drive with the old in drive 1. I went to bed because I knew it would take 3 or 4 hours to complete the transfer. Had two 500GB drives installed.
To my surprise the next morning, the unit had come to a complete halt. I removed the new drive and tried to restart the NAS with only the old drive in bay 1. It never came back up. When I run the Raidar, it reports that there is a bad root sector. To my dismay, I had over 5 years of photos taken as a professional photographer loaded without a backup. Now it looks like I've lost all of the photos. I purchased a disk salvage program and let it run to extract data found on one of the drives and it took 5 hours to go through the drive extracting my photos. It did extract the images but none had meaningful filenames, the folder structure was non-existant and all of the photos were fragmented. Bottom line, the extraction performed by the salvage software was useless. Now I'm trying to get a refund for the salvage software.
Since the ReadyNas Duo V1 is over 4 years old, I can't get any support from Netgear. I'm not pressing Netgear to repair the drive but I would like to get my precious photos and move them to another storage device. I always though I was safe with RAID storage because of it's built in redundancy but now it looks like it's easy to lose information when the RAID Management software fails, becomes unsupported and is proprietary.
FWIW The raid is not proprietary (xraid is built on top of standard raid).
Try linux reader (http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/) in a windows PC (connecting disk 1 with SATA or USB).
If you don't see the C partition, then try the other disk.
Thank you for your suggestion on Reading and Extracting information from my NETGEAR drives. I tried your suggestion by inserting one of the two drives in a SATA case connected via USB to my desktop Windows computer running Win 7. Using the linux tool you suggested, program was able to "see" the drive but was unable to open its files. For some reason, it seems like the NETGEAR system corrupted the root file system on the disks because when I initialize spare disk units in READYNAS Duo drives 1 and 2, both start up, initialize and the partitions are accessible from Windows. But when I replace the newly initialized drives with my old drives, the ReadyNAS Duo will not read them. I even upgraded the NETGEAR OS Firmware to version 4.1.14 and I was still unable to read the disks.
I'm wondering if NETGEAR will allow me to send them one of the drives so they can repair the root segment well enough to read the disk content while preserving the Windows file structure. My goal is to extract the more than 15,000 photographic images from the drives. I never backed up the RAID to other disk media because I always thought that I had protection on the mirrored drive and the likelihood that both disk would fail simultaneously, was nonexistent. What I did not know was that the weak point was the possibility of a corrupted file system on both disks.
williehoward wrote:
...For some reason, it seems like the NETGEAR system corrupted the root file system on the disks because when I initialize spare disk units in READYNAS Duo drives 1 and 2, both start up, initialize and the partitions are accessible from Windows. But when I replace the newly initialized drives with my old drives, the ReadyNAS Duo will not read them. I even upgraded the NETGEAR OS Firmware to version 4.1.14 and I was still unable to read the disks.
Yes, it does sound like damage was done to the partitioning on both drives. Though I am confused on how you upgraded the NAS firmware - was that with the spare disks in place?
I'm wondering if NETGEAR will allow me to send them one of the drives so they can repair the root segment well enough to read the disk content while preserving the Windows file structure...
There is no windows file structure on the drives.
Netgear does offer a recovery service, so you could contact support.netgear.com and ask. Seagate offers this also. WDC instead provides links to "recovery partners" on their website.
These services are expensive, so you should think about how much you are prepared to spend before you start.
Yes. I upgraded the firmware to version 4.1.14 with the spare disk in place. After they initialized and all the disk activity subsided, I inserted one of the primary disk with data in disk 1 slot and the ReadyNas was unable to read it.
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