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Forum Discussion
Is it possible to mount a BTRFS partition on an external disk on the ReadyNAS?
Hi all,
I am trying to get data from an old disk previously used in my ReadyNAS - I have an offsite copy of the data but given the current circumstances I can't easily get to it. Is it possible to mount the disk in a USB caddy and read the BTRFS filesystem as an external disk on the ReadyNAS? I have only ever prevsiously used NTFS disks as external drives on this unit.
I have tried installing the BTRFS reader on my Win10 laptop so far without success, so I am hoping this will work. If this doesn't work my next attempt will be mounting the disk as a BTRFS volume on my Linux VM in Virtualbox, but mounting physical disks in VirtualBox is much harder than it should be!
I don't intend to ever place this old disk back in the ReadyNAS array, so if mounting this way does something 'destructive' I am ok with that.
Thanks in advance.
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robmash wrote:
I am trying to get data from an old disk previously used in my ReadyNAS - I have an offsite copy of the data but given the current circumstances I can't easily get to it. Is it possible to mount the disk in a USB caddy and read the BTRFS filesystem as an external disk on the ReadyNAS? I have only ever prevsiously used NTFS disks as external drives on this unit.
What RAID mode were you using in the NAS?
How many disks were in the array?
BTRFS alone isn't enough, you need the MDADM driver as well, as ReadyNAS uses BTRFS on top of MDADM RAID bacause BTRFS RAID is not ready for prime time. This will only work if your drive was a single JBOD or one of a two-drive RAID1. Otherwise, you need more drives from the set.
This was a volume which was not part of a RAID group, configured as JBOD. So, based upon what you say it should work. However, when I plug the drive in I see nothing. Is there anything else I need to do?
Older thread, but the old Intel ss4200-e also used mdadm and a user recovered an entire raid by simply putting the drives in a system and booting up a ubuntu live cd--the entire volume was automatically there without any work. I can give you the exact version of the live cd and a link if you would like to give it a shot.
SamirD wrote:
Older thread, but the old Intel ss4200-e also used mdadm and a user recovered an entire raid by simply putting the drives in a system and booting up a ubuntu live cd--the entire volume was automatically there without any work. I can give you the exact version of the live cd and a link if you would like to give it a shot.
A live-cd is another option. But with the ReadyNAS, there generally are some commands needed to mount the array.
There were supposed to be some commands to mount the Intel's drives too, but those instructions are dated, and when someone just a year ago booted ubuntu because they had to recover their data since their power supply died, the raid was already assembled for him. :D It is probably the fastest data recovery I've ever seen from a 'dead' raid unit--took him only 15 minutes to get access to his data again. :)
Poking around in the ReadyNas OS4 dmesg, it is very similar to the Intel nas units I have so I have some confidence that mounting the raid might be just as easy. I hope it is because that will be really nice. :)
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