ReadyNAS NV+ dead drive no backup please help!

Probably you should follow up with support.

Can you see the shares through windows explorer?

Nope the shares aren't available in windows explorer. I can ping the ip address and the unit shows up in raidar but that's it. I have been following up with support, but putting it all out here in hopes that someone else may have some additional insight and for documentation purposes.

Did you get this sorted? Sorry to hear of your photos lost! This is my ultimate nightmare..

tdawgy wrote:
Nope the shares aren't available in windows explorer. I can ping the ip address and the unit shows up in raidar but that's it. I have been following up with support, but putting it all out here in hopes that someone else may have some additional insight and for documentation purposes.

Have you tried removing a drive (from the powered-down NAS), attaching it to a Windows computer, and then trying to see your files with Linux Reader for Windows?

Reading drives with linux reader would only work with a drive from a RAID 1 array, in other words if there were 2 mirrored drives. tdawgy has a raid 5 array with 4 drives.

I haven't got this sorted yet, they did confirm that drive 4 was also dead (it dying explains the erratic behavior i was experiencing). Luckily I was able to clone drive 4 to a second new drive, I'm currently waiting to hear back from them what the next step is. Not sure if it's as simple as popping in the new disk 4 clone or if something else needs to be done first.

djkus wrote:
Did you get this sorted? Sorry to hear of your photos lost! This is my ultimate nightmare..

I work late and long hours, these pictures are my window into time lost with my kids/wife. If I lose all of these I'll be ruined. If this doesn't work, I'll send them off to one of those "clean room" data recovery places. Hopefully it doesn't come to that, but if it does, any suggestions?

It may be as simple as powering off the system adding the clone and then booting the NAS. Whatever you do, don't add the disk while the NAS is on as disks added while the NAS is on are wiped.

I would wait though to see what support suggests first.

tdawgy wrote:
I work late and long hours, these pictures are my window into time lost with my kids/wife. If I lose all of these I'll be ruined. If this doesn't work, I'll send them off to one of those "clean room" data recovery places. Hopefully it doesn't come to that, but if it does, any suggestions?

It's possible that some of your data may not be recoverable (some may be corrupt) but hopefully most of it will be.

Data recovery places you try should be familiar with Linux and software RAID. If they are not don't use them. In future please backup your data regularly. It is much cheaper than using data recovery services and can help save irreplaceable data.

Well I was in between backup solutions at the moment, only took 1 week for 2 drives to fail on me that's the crappy part. Support had me install the cloned drive and the new disk 1 and turn it on. Everything looked great at first, it was rebuilding the disk 1 and the activity LED was very active when I went to bed. Then in the morning the only LED that's blinking is the disk 1 and it still says rebuilding disk 1. It's been over 24 hours at this point and the activity LED has been inactive, so I'm thinking something went wrong with the rebuild of disk 1 and the ReadyNAS appears to be locked up. They've escalated back to level 3 support (the support team has been amazing through all of this), but sadly the saga continues.