It finally happened - I have the dreaded lifesupp message. I've powered down the unit to hopefully preserve whats there.
3 x 5TB Seagate drives XRAID2 (RAID5), started to get warning messages about increased errors on drive 2 so i began the process of taking a backup. I regularly backup, but over the last few weeks i've begun to digitise a lot of old photos and CD collection. So even the backup is not 100% complete.
I rebooted the NAS yesterday, but the shares were missing (Missing Shares Detected error). They were visible through the dashboard but couldn't connect to them with Mac or PC.
My question is what options do i have? I have a suspicion 2 out of the 3 drives have failed so i'm not holding out much hope.
Would 3rd party RAID recovery software work? Something like R-Studio. Or could Netgear Tech help to confirm if this is something recoverable? It's a very old unit so well outside of any warranty or support period.
I have a suspicion 2 out of the 3 drives have failed so i'm not holding out much hope.
Try connecting them to a Windows PC (either sata or usb) and testing them with Seatools (using the long test). Label them by slot as you remove them from the NAS.
Would 3rd party RAID recovery software work? Something like R-Studio. Or could Netgear Tech help to confirm if this is something recoverable? It's a very old unit so well outside of any warranty or support period.
If the disks are reasonably intact, you could try cloning them.
Though you haven't asked, it's best to get NAS-purposed replacement drives (in particular, don't get Seagate DM drives). 5 TB isn't popular now, so you'd need to move up to 6. In this size range, Ironwolf drives are a better choice than the WD EFAX drives.
@StephenB wrote:Try connecting them to a Windows PC (either sata or usb) and testing them with Seatools (using the long test). Label them by slot as you remove them from the NAS.
Thanks - running 'Long Generic' test on the first drive now. Might take a while!
@StephenB wrote:Try connecting them to a Windows PC (either sata or usb) and testing them with Seatools (using the long test). Label them by slot as you remove them from the NAS.
Disk 1 (Bay 2)
Short test: Pass
Long Test: Fail after 10 minutes (Code F167CCDB)
Disk 2 (Bay 3)
Short test: Pass
Long Test: Pass (10 hours)
Disk 3 (Bay 4)
Short test: Pass
Long Test: Pass (10 hours)
So i'm hopeful that I can still recover the data from the 2 working drives, but why would the NAS suddenly not be able to mount the volumes?
If i try any sort of error correction to recover bad sectors on disk 1, will that risk further data loss?
If i go ahead with R-Studio, should I mount all three disks into a virtual raid, or just the 2 functioning disks?
***** File system check performed at Tue May 26 10:25:31 GMT 2020 ***** fsck from util-linux-ng 2.17.2 fsck.ext4: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/c/c Possibly non-existent device?
The paths for the shares listed below could not be found. Â Typically, this occurs when the ReadyNAS is unable to access the data volume.
I beleive i may have started with 2 discs, and added a 3rd but couldn't say for sure.
I've tried R-Studio, their advice is to run the autodetect. I will also try the ReclaiMe RAID parameters tool to find the correct settings but both will take a considerable amount of time - i was hoping for a shortcut.
I beleive i may have started with 2 discs, and added a 3rd but couldn't say for sure.
That doesn't matter. Vertical expansion (upgrading disks to bigger sizes) does. When you do that there are multiple RAID groups that are concatenated into a single volume.
4.2.x and 6.x.x systems use a chunk sizes of 64K, and are left-symmetric. Since you have 3 disks, you are using RAID-5. But I don't know the other parameters.
@StephenB wrote: That doesn't matter. Vertical expansion (upgrading disks to bigger sizes) does. When you do that there are multiple RAID groups that are concatenated into a single volume.
4.2.x and 6.x.x systems use a chunk sizes of 64K, and are left-symmetric. Since you have 3 disks, you are using RAID-5. But I don't know the other parameters.
OK only ever had the 5TB drives so no vertical expansion.
65536 or 64000? Autodetect is still running. Processed 1GB so far, i'm really hoping it wont need to do the other 499GB otherwise this is around 2 months wait time!
So i set those parameters, RAID5, Left sync, 64k block size but it resulted in dozens of recognised partitions all with different file systems, and I wasn't able to emulate any of the files. The one 9.1TB partition looked promising but no directory structure was discovered and the files dotn load (and have random names as if they are recovered files).
I'm trying again with the autodetect, but that will take several days. Failing that, I may try the Ubuntu route as others have suggested on the forum in the past but Linux is new to me so it's going to be a steep learning curve.
