Recovering from a crash

RubberToe wrote:
I've now performed a factory reset and chose not to overwrite the drives. That is now complete and the system seems fine. However, all my files are gone. Can anyone help before panic sets in?

Performing a factory reset on your NAS will cause the stored data to be all wiped out and there is no way to recover it. Ensuring a backup is always recommended.

Well that's not very nice.

Seems like a waste of money to have a fancy raid device and then lose everything when one out of 4 disks crash.

Not impressed!

There was a dead disk that could'be broken the array that is why the volume were not accessible. But that does not certainly mean that you have to perform a factory reset, there were warnings on the KB's and the manual that it will delete your data. Performing a factory reset will delete everything no matter what raid type you use.

A reset seemed like the only option. There was no warning about data loss and I didn't want to pay £60 for Netgear support.

Any other options I could explore? Assuming there is no way to undo a factory reset, I need to try other ways to retrieve the data. Presumably, the 3 healthy drives had all the data on them before the reset? If so it's likely to still be there in some format I'm assuming.

I have attached one of the drives to my computer and it does show 3 partitions. However, no drive letter is assigned so I can't attempt to recover files. Any suggestions?

RubberToe wrote:
Presumably, the 3 healthy drives had all the data on them before the reset?

You were right about this assuming the NAS is set to X-RAID. You should have tried to boot up the NAS with 3 disks inside and access the data to back it up.

But still, there is no way that you could retrieve the data once a factory reset has been done unless you have a backup of it.

If the drives were on the units then you performed a factory reset, all the data will be wiped out. I'm thinking the drive that was marked "dead", see if the PC would detect it. It is on a linux format so you might need some software like the one on the link below:

http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/

If you have done a factory reset then there is (realistically) no possibility of data recovery.
If you want to contact support for their opinion then do so. Your data was clearly important
Even if you wanted to retrieve data from a raid array, looking at one of the drives would not work, you'd need to mount the array.

You said in your first post that you "chose not to overwrite the drives" . What do you mean?

Your experience is not typical.

Thanks for the responses folks.

After the crash I tried running with the other 3 disks. I could see the folders in explorer but could not access them. I could access the control panel but no volumes were showing. I put a new drive in to replace the crashed one but same result. No luck trying to access anything. I came across a post somewhere that said a factory reset would sort it without reformatting the drives.

During the reset I looked at the 3 options - x-raid2, flex-raid or erase volume. In my head I assumed the last one was the dangerous one and went for flex-raid. Doh!

So basically I mucked up. In my defense, I understood that a failure of any of the drives would not result in any data loss. I don't have a backup as the whole idea of me buying this system was to have redundancy.

We will probably never know what when wrong with your system. You should have been able to access the data with only 3 disks, although sometimes this requires removal of the bad disks and a reboot. You may have had a problem with one of the other disks too, and there are other reasons why redundancy is not a substitute for a backup.
I would test all of the remaining "good" disks with vendor tools before setting up your nas again.