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Forum Discussion
Chances of Recovery
Hoping to (hopefully) find some sliver of light at the end of what appears to be a very dark tunnel at this time. It appears that I have lost two of the four drives (in a very short time period) ...
StephenB wrote:
You will begin by mounting the drive with the NAS powered down. Then power up. But the array will probably be out of sync (there will be changes to the volume that were never written to disk 4. In that case there would be some steps with mdadm and btrfs to force the array to mount. Likely there will be some file corruption/loss too. So you would need to enable ssh, and manually run some commands to do that.
I'd get two replacement drives. But I wouldn't attempt to clone disk 3. If you are successful, you will still have a degraded array. You can hot-insert a blank disk 3, in order to recover from that part. Though I'd urge you to make a backup to external storage before you do that.
This is where you lose me. I know enough to be dangerous with consumer level computing. When it comes to command line, what I would call higher level work, I get lost fast. I will pass this information on to him and see what his thoughts on the process are. This is much more of his day to day than it is mine. Now, this makes cloning the drive sound like the easy part. Haha!
So I am looking at picking up two new drives, if not four to ultimately get the array to where I want it to be. As well as an external to move files to in the interim. One step closer. Still keeping those fingers crossed.
To be honest, unless your friend is familiar with mdadm raids and BTRFS filesystems and understands the raid layout on a ReayNAS, then the "hard" part of assembling the raid, is better done with Netgear L3 support.
He/she will need to understand how to access the unit in Tech Support mode, safely start the OS raid - md0 (proably best to start that in degraded mode with disk 1 and 2 alone) and mount the OS, followed by chroot'ing into the OS with the correct mount bindings for sys, dev and proc. Then examine the raid super blocks for the data raid (md127) between disk 1 and 2 and the cloned disk 4, to see how far off the sync is between them and then judge if it is safe to assemble it (raid will definitely be marked "dirty" at this point). This will then be followed by mounting the data BRTFS filesystem and hope it doesn't spew a bunch of errors and you will likely need to zero-log the filesysten journal too because in this situation you will probably have inconsistency between the journal and the filesystem. Lastly, one would sync in the new disk 4 to the md0 raid as well.
It is a lot of technical jargon and things to battle with, if the experience isn't there. I agree that cloning the disk can be done by yourself (just be careful to clone in the correct direct. Don't overwrite the opriginal disk 4. I have seen people clone the new empty disk onto the one containing the data. You don't want to be that guy as that will be game over! ). It will surely not take Netgear L3 too long to assess, re-assemble the raid and mount up the filesystem but they also do this, if not daily, then at least weekly. We suggest this route for a good reason :) You can save time (money) cloning the disk yourself if you wish, but leave the harder technical part to the people who knows the product - is my advise.
If you had a hard time getting in touch with L3 through support, maybe StephenB can ping a few mods to help get a case created for you (I am not sure who the mods are these days).
Cheers
I will forward this all over to him. This is not something he does often so its more my trust in him than anything.
With the data on the line at that point, he may just help me clone the drive and go from there. I will see if I can get in touch with someone in L3 Support unless StephenB has another suggestion.
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