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Disk volume no longer active - force activation?
I come in hopes to be saved from myself and that I didn't in fact lose it all. I've had this NAS for a few years now, and it has done me well. I started with a 3TB and over the years I've started...
Did you try booting to volume read-only mode?
On Linux you'd need mdadm for the RAID and btrfs-progs for the filesystem.
So you could try at your own risk e.g. (note if not logged in as the superuser you may need to preface commands with sudo)
To install mdadm and btrfs-progs if not already on the system:
# apt-get install mdadm btrfs-progs
To assemble the RAID
# mdadm --assemble --scan
In case it's a multi-layer data volume we should scan for BTRFS devices
# btrfs device scan
We should also check with md RAID device(s) correspond(s) to the data volume
# btrfs fi show
And try mounting it read-only
# mount -o ro -t btrfs /dev/md127 /mnt
This working would assume things are in a good state which they may not be.
If it won't mount you can check dmesg for clues# dmesg | tail
Thanks for the assistance nonetheless.
You don't say what RAID configuration the unit was in, but I'll assume XRAID. That being the case, you made several mistaken assumptions:
You can't put just one 6TB in place of a 3TB and have the volume expand. What you got (3TB) is exactly as expected. You would need a second 6TB for expansion so the extra 3TB has redundancy.
You can't add a 3TB drive to your single-drive 6TB system after you destroyed the initial volume. The second drive needs to be at least as large as the first. Normally, it simply wouldn't work (compliaing the drive is too small and/or "dirty") and you could remove the drive with it's contents still intact. But if you did something, you may have made it unaccessable.
I don't see anything where you tried to re-boot with just the initially removed 3TB in the unit. Unless you did something while it was together with the 6TB, it should boot and be accessible, though non-redundant.
It was RAID1 so I'm assuming it was on X-RAID. With the destroyed volume, I had the 3TB removed at the time, so only the 6TB was affected.
As for the 3TB on its own, if that's all that's in when I bring it back online, it never boots.
Cyntalan wrote:
I had the 3TB removed at the time, so only the 6TB was affected.
Just to be clear, that's not 100% correct. The NAS application has a persistent database, and when you DESTROYed the volume you also removed the volume/RAID-group information in that database as well as the share configuration (stored in the 6 TB drive's OS partition).
And the 6 TB drive was also part of the configuration information that was stored on the 3 TB's drive's OS partition.
Something clearly went wrong when you tried to boot up the 3 TB drive by itself. But what should have happened is that the NAS would have shown the volume as degraded, since it was expecting RAID-1 and there was a disk missing.
Status Update: I was finally able to get an extra SATA data cable and ReclaiMe easily discovered the btrfs filesystem and can read the data just fine. Now it's simply a matter of: is there a way I can read this data without spending $200? I tried a few different avenues so far: WinBTRFS drivers (Win 10 still does not detect it and I'm unsure how to as the documentation kinda confuses me) and an Ubuntu LiveUSB installation (to which it was unable to find and using mdadm I was still unable to mount it. It looked like it attempted to mount {saw the new multi-tier drive icon show up on the side bar for a moment or two} and gave up).
If I have to, I will just get the license for ReclaiMe, but since I'm not dealing with raw data recovery, it seems like overkill when it should be reasonable to just to mount it, seeing as there's no actual damage to anything, and frankly the NAS should still be able to read it, just as degraded. But maybe I'm wrong and I have no other choice.
Did you try booting to volume read-only mode?
On Linux you'd need mdadm for the RAID and btrfs-progs for the filesystem.
So you could try at your own risk e.g. (note if not logged in as the superuser you may need to preface commands with sudo)
To install mdadm and btrfs-progs if not already on the system:
# apt-get install mdadm btrfs-progs
To assemble the RAID
# mdadm --assemble --scan
In case it's a multi-layer data volume we should scan for BTRFS devices
# btrfs device scan
We should also check with md RAID device(s) correspond(s) to the data volume
# btrfs fi show
And try mounting it read-only
# mount -o ro -t btrfs /dev/md127 /mnt
This working would assume things are in a good state which they may not be.
If it won't mount you can check dmesg for clues# dmesg | tail
mdgm-ntgr wrote:Did you try booting to volume read-only mode?
On Linux you'd need mdadm for the RAID and btrfs-progs for the filesystem.
So you could try at your own risk e.g. (note if not logged in as the superuser you may need to preface commands with sudo)
To install mdadm and btrfs-progs if not already on the system:
# apt-get install mdadm btrfs-progs
To assemble the RAID
# mdadm --assemble --scan
In case it's a multi-layer data volume we should scan for BTRFS devices
# btrfs device scan
We should also check with md RAID device(s) correspond(s) to the data volume
# btrfs fi show
And try mounting it read-only
# mount -o ro -t btrfs /dev/md127 /mnt
This working would assume things are in a good state which they may not be.
If it won't mount you can check dmesg for clues# dmesg | tail
This solution ultimately worked. I created an Ubuntu LiveUSB, installed mdadm and samba, did the assemble step with mdadm which automounted the drive, and just used the Ubuntu GUI to connect to the smb server. From there I was able to just copy everything over to the 6TB by hand.
Dunno if this would be an issue for everyone or if it was just me, but the LiveUSB froze after about an hour or enough data transfer, so I think there was something weird occurring regarding the communication or perhaps the limitation of it being all in RAM was doing something over time with more data being pushed around, but while it took a couple days of transferring it all over piecemeal, it did the job eventually. Thanks for the assistance!
So did you try the volume read-only boot menu option?: ReadyNAS & ReadyDATA: Boot Menu
If that worked that would have been a lot simpler than using a LiveUSB etc. though it's nice for you to know that there are steps that you can take using an ordinary x86 Linux machine to attempt data recovery (at your own risk).
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