Failed Drive - Can't Boot! HELP! #19341286

Status update and a few questions:

First status:

• I've now got three new 2TB drives; I used dd to clone the two error free drives; I tried to add a new clean drive in the readynas with the two good drives but nothing. I then tried dd_rescue to clone the failed drive. dd_rescue crashed after over 20 hours twice, so tried ddrescue (no underscore) and was more successful. It was able to successfully recover 1.89TB of the failed 2TB drive. I thought this was quite the achievement, but when it's a striped volume, the disk on its own doesn't get me very far. I tried a few utilities that claimed to read raid 5 volumes, but nothing. I tried sticking the disks back in the readynas in every combination (all 3, 1&2, 2&3, 1&3) but also to no avail. My readynas just won't boot. It starts to boot and once I even picked it up on Raidar with status booting before it disappeared again and just sat there with the blue power light pulsing.

Now questions (any help is gratefully accepted):

• What are the chances that there are logs on the ReadyNAS that might explain what happened? (i.e. when one drive failed, did something else get corrupt? Did it start to re-initialise my other two drives? Is there just some kind of firmware corruption? Hardware issue? )


• If such logs exist, how might I gain access to them given that I can't boot? Would sticking in a separate clean disk allow it to boot? If so, would that reset old logs and settings?

Basically, what I'm trying to do is try to determine the best next step. If there's any indication from the log data that the readynas itself may have issues due failure or corruption I'd have a pretty good chance to get stuff back by finding another machine to pop my disks into, whereas if the logs indicated that it recognised my failed volume as new disks and did bad things to them then I know I've likely got some pricey recovery process ahead.

I'm a little disappointed in the Netgear support though I should've expected as much since I do have a much older model. Their response is that they can't help me because my product is out of support and EOL. :-( I still feel like they could chime in with a few suggestions other than take your drives to a local IT technician. sigh.

Anyway, I guess I'm going to start looking into getting quotes on the recovery process. If there are any suggestions out there please throw them my way and thanks fro the comments and assistance thus far!