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Failed Drive - Can't Boot! HELP! #19341286
Hi everyone,
I hope someone out there can give me some guidance as I no longer have access to my data and somewhat stressed to say the least...
I've got the ReadyNAS NV and it's been working flawlessly for nearly 6 years! Here's the situation... My setup is 3x 2TB Seagate drives using X-RAID running RAIDiator 4.1.9. Starting Friday Aug 24th I received a number of email alerts:
Unfortunately, I was out of town away from email and didn't receive these alerts until the 26th and would still be away for another 5 days. I was able to access my home network remotely and log into frontview and shut down the ReadyNAS until my return yesterday. However, upon arriving home, I noted that the power button LED was still on despite my shutdown attempt (phasing in and out.) I unplugged the power and powered back on but RAIDar was unable to detect it. I reset again and could ping the ReadyNAS by IP address, but not by name. This time RAIDar was able to detect it but with a blue status light and last column contained "bad disks detected".
I shut down again removed each disk and ran Seagate's Seatools for windows via an eSATA connection. Disk 1 failed both the generic short and long hard drive tests, Disk 2 passed the short test (didn't try long) and Disk 3 passed both short and long tests. Now when I boot up the ReadyNAS the power button LED just fades in and out with no drive LED or activity LED indicators flashing. I've tried to start up with Disk 1 removed, thinking that maybe its problems were causing the issues and that 2 and 3 could run without redundancy long enough for me to back up my files but I get the same problem. After many successive tries I've been unable to even get RAIDar to detect my ReadyNAS, nor have I been able to ping it at all, whether by name or IP. After hunting around the forums, I suspect I *may* have (but am not sure) unintentionally held the power button long enough when turning on to run the "skip volume check" mode which I now know comes with warnings.
I'm scared to death of losing my and my family's documents, pictures, history, etc... and am hoping with every ounce of my being that I've not lost it all. Any advice, recommendations, words of encouragement or assistance in any form would be greatly appreciated.
BTW, I'm willing to accept my stupidity for not setting up a backup for my RAIDed setup. I did have, but my backup died a long while ago and I hadn't replaced it yet due to other priorities and a sense of over-confidence established by the consistently solid performance of my ReadyNAS over the years. I'm desperately hoping I won't be paying for this mistake for years to come with permanent data loss and will actively ensure I will never put myself through this again!!!
I've opened a ticket with my.netgear.com (ticket #19341286) so I'm sitting here holding my breath, crossing my fingers and knocking on so much wood I fear my knuckles will never be quite the same.
Thoughts, ideas.... please?!
Thanks!
I hope someone out there can give me some guidance as I no longer have access to my data and somewhat stressed to say the least...
I've got the ReadyNAS NV and it's been working flawlessly for nearly 6 years! Here's the situation... My setup is 3x 2TB Seagate drives using X-RAID running RAIDiator 4.1.9. Starting Friday Aug 24th I received a number of email alerts:
- Aug-24 5:51:09am: RAID event detected; Access to the disk on channel (??) is producing I/O errors. Although the array is still redundant, please replace this drive as soon as possible, as it is likely to fail soon.
Aug-24 5:51:09am: RAID event detected; Access to the disk on channel (??) is producing I/O errors. Although the array is still redundant, please replace this drive as soon as possible, as it is likely to fail soon.
Aug-24 5:51:09am: RAID event detected; Access to the disk on channel (??) is producing I/O errors. Although the array is still redundant, please replace this drive as soon as possible, as it is likely to fail soon.
Aug-24 5:51:10am: RAID event detected; Access to the disk on channel (??) is producing I/O errors. Although the array is still redundant, please replace this drive as soon as possible, as it is likely to fail soon.
Aug-24 5:51:09am: Disk failure detected.; Disk fail event occurred on SATA channel 3.
Aug-24 5:51:10am: Hotplug disk event detected; Disk add event occurred on SATA channel 3.
Aug-24 6:59:04am: RAID event detected; RAID sync started on volume C.
Aug-24 7:00am: New SMART disk errors detected!; ATA error count has increased in the last day. Disk 1: Previous count: 0 Current count: 3183
Aug-24 4:26:09pm: RAID event detected; RAID sync finished on volume C. The volume is now fully redundant.
Aug-25 4:00am: New SMART disk errors detected!; Reallocated sector count has increased in the last day. Disk 1: Previous count: 0 Current count: 2 ATA error count has increased in the last day. Disk 1: Previous count: 3183 Current count: 3191 Reallocated sector count has increased in the last day. Disk 3: Previous count: 0 Current count: 934 Growing SMART errors indicate a disk that may fail soon. If the errors continue to increase, you should be prepared to replace the disk.
Aug-26 4:00am: New SMART disk errors detected!; Reallocated sector count has increased in the last day. Disk 1: Previous count: 2 Current count: 4ATA error count has increased in the last day. Disk 1: Previous count: 3191 Current count: 3201 Growing SMART errors indicate a disk that may fail soon. If the errors continue to increase, you should be prepared to replace the disk.
Unfortunately, I was out of town away from email and didn't receive these alerts until the 26th and would still be away for another 5 days. I was able to access my home network remotely and log into frontview and shut down the ReadyNAS until my return yesterday. However, upon arriving home, I noted that the power button LED was still on despite my shutdown attempt (phasing in and out.) I unplugged the power and powered back on but RAIDar was unable to detect it. I reset again and could ping the ReadyNAS by IP address, but not by name. This time RAIDar was able to detect it but with a blue status light and last column contained "bad disks detected".
I shut down again removed each disk and ran Seagate's Seatools for windows via an eSATA connection. Disk 1 failed both the generic short and long hard drive tests, Disk 2 passed the short test (didn't try long) and Disk 3 passed both short and long tests. Now when I boot up the ReadyNAS the power button LED just fades in and out with no drive LED or activity LED indicators flashing. I've tried to start up with Disk 1 removed, thinking that maybe its problems were causing the issues and that 2 and 3 could run without redundancy long enough for me to back up my files but I get the same problem. After many successive tries I've been unable to even get RAIDar to detect my ReadyNAS, nor have I been able to ping it at all, whether by name or IP. After hunting around the forums, I suspect I *may* have (but am not sure) unintentionally held the power button long enough when turning on to run the "skip volume check" mode which I now know comes with warnings.
I'm scared to death of losing my and my family's documents, pictures, history, etc... and am hoping with every ounce of my being that I've not lost it all. Any advice, recommendations, words of encouragement or assistance in any form would be greatly appreciated.
BTW, I'm willing to accept my stupidity for not setting up a backup for my RAIDed setup. I did have, but my backup died a long while ago and I hadn't replaced it yet due to other priorities and a sense of over-confidence established by the consistently solid performance of my ReadyNAS over the years. I'm desperately hoping I won't be paying for this mistake for years to come with permanent data loss and will actively ensure I will never put myself through this again!!!
I've opened a ticket with my.netgear.com (ticket #19341286) so I'm sitting here holding my breath, crossing my fingers and knocking on so much wood I fear my knuckles will never be quite the same.
Thoughts, ideas.... please?!
Thanks!
19 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- Yikes.
Normally you'd be able to see the Nas with RAIDar even if it was doing a factory default.
Were disk 2 and disk 3 in their original slots when you tried that? Did you hot-add the drives, or was the NAS off (hopefully it was off).
Seems to me that there are two basic possibilities - either the NAS attempted to re-initialize the disks, or it didn't. If it did, then you would need some form of forensic data recovery, which would be expensive.
If it didn't, then perhaps something else broke on the NAS during the repeated restarts. In that case it is possible that you can get the data back more easily.
One path is to power down the NAS, and switch to off line tools (eliminating any possibility that resync, etc will do more damage). Third party services for this might be affordable (I think it gets much more expensive if the disk has been formatted). Some only charge if they get the data back.
Another way to protect your data from further damage is to get 3 new disks, and clone the existing ones (including the failed volume). Then you can try things with the cloned drives, without further risk to the originals. yeneric wrote: I've tried to start up with Disk 1 removed, thinking that maybe its problems were causing the issues and that 2 and 3 could run without redundancy long enough for me to back up my files but I get the same problem.
This is no help now, but I would have quit and posted here for advice after doing the Seatools tests, and if this board did not exist I'd likely have tried replacing the defective Disk 1 and hope that Disks 2 and 3 would rebuild it. I'd appreciate if someone more experienced than I would confirm that this latter is the right way to think about it.
Somewhere here there is a link to information about mounting disks and recovering data outside of the ReadyNAS environs--hopefully someone will have that handy and post it (then I will bookmark it myself!).- Trying to boot w/o the defective disk was a reasonable idea, and shouldn't have hurt anything. However the successive reboots and the need for abnormal shutdowns show that something is messed up.
If the data partitions on drives 2 and 3 are still solid, it should be possible to get the data off. Without knowing exactly what was done and when, its a bit hard to tell if that is the case or not. - Thanks for the responses and suggestions. I've not done anything new yet -- my fancy new paperweight is a bit scary to me at the moment.
As for the details of what happened and when, I did nothing for a few days after all the email alerts. When I did see the alerts, I logged into the web interface and chose shutdown.
When I got home 5 days later, the blue power button LED was pulsing. I pulled the plug to power it down. I hit the power button to turn it back on and the drive LEDs never came on. The power button just pulsed and RAIDar couldn't find it. I tried the cut power and startup thing a few more times, all with the same result. At that point is when I *think* I may have held the power button and unknowingly at the time went into skip volume check mode. This time however, RAIDAR eventually did find my ReadyNAS with the bad disks detected message. That's when I removed all the disks and ran the HDD tests, discovering that volume 1 had legitimately failed. I then put volumes 2 and 3 back in (in their original slots 2 & 3), leaving slot 1 empty -- all while the power was off and the machine was unplugged. I got similar results as before with this configuration -- pulsing power LED and no luck with RAIDar.
StephenB: the offline tools you suggest -- are these the type of thing I could find online and try myself or is this something I'd need to have done professionally with specialised (i.e. expensive) equipment/software? I'm generally quite comfortable with computers as a developer and eternal tinkerer (though finding that as life goes on, time for these things is much tighter and tends to be lower on the priority list.)
To clone the drives (if I decide to fork out about $300 for new drives rather than go straight to some other form of professional recovery), is something like EaseUS (first one that I came across that does sector by sector copies) good? Are there any particular favourites out there?
What's the best way to determine if drives 2 and 3 are still ok or to approach getting the data off? maxblack, I'll try to hunt down that post you speak of regarding mounting the drives outside of the ReadyNAS world -- that sounds promising.
If it comes to this, does anyone know of any reasonable/reliable/recommended recovery services in the vicinity of Toronto, Canada?
Thanks again for the replies -- despite the fact that I've not yet established the extent of my problems, it's somewhat comforting to know there are competent folks out there that are willing to provide assistance. I'll keep checking in for feedback and provide any updates as they occur. maxblack wrote: Somewhere here there is a link to information about mounting disks and recovering data outside of the ReadyNAS environs--hopefully someone will have that handy and post it (then I will bookmark it myself!).
was this the post you were talking about?- http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=65639&hilit=recover+data&start=15 (which points here: http://home.bott.ca/webserver/?p=306)
These links provide some interesting ideas though I'm not sure I'm ready to start building a new linux machine. However, there was mention somewhere in there about a linux VM available, though I think it might've been just for the duo -- I'll do some more thorough reading in the coming days and see.- There are some recovery software packages that claim support for Linux file systems running on RAID (and which run on windows). I'm not sure how well they work, or how they handle RAID if you don't have enough SATA connections. One package is here: http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizardpro/
- Well not exactly. What I would try first myself is one or more of the utilities like "Ext2 IFS for Windows" e.g.
http://www.fs-driver.org/
There are others but you'll have to find them yourself ie. Google or Bing on "mount ext2 file system windows". Maybe you can access your ReadyNAS disks' files easily this way. If it works by all means let us know.yeneric wrote: maxblack wrote: Somewhere here there is a link to information about mounting disks and recovering data outside of the ReadyNAS environs--hopefully someone will have that handy and post it (then I will bookmark it myself!).
was this the post you were talking about?- http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=65639&hilit=recover+data&start=15 (which points here: http://home.bott.ca/webserver/?p=306)
These links provide some interesting ideas though I'm not sure I'm ready to start building a new linux machine. However, there was mention somewhere in there about a linux VM available, though I think it might've been just for the duo -- I'll do some more thorough reading in the coming days and see.
AFAIK this has no support for RAID, though utilities like this can be used to read backup USB drives that are formatted as ext3 or ext4.maxblack wrote: Well not exactly. What I would try first myself is one or more of the utilities like "Ext2 IFS for Windows" e.g.
http://www.fs-driver.org/StephenB wrote: AFAIK this has no support for RAID, though utilities like this can be used to read backup USB drives that are formatted as ext3 or ext4.
I think you're right, though it'd be easy for the OP to try.- Well, he has no backup and disks in an unknown state already, so playing with packages that aren't designed for data recovery seems like a waste of time.
If I were in his shoes, I'd want something solid, ideally with good support.
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