Can Raidiator 4.x unit (ReadyNAS Pro) read disks from 5.x (NV+ v2)?

[elnjensen]

My ReadyNAS NV+ v2 unit seems to have died - rapidly flashing backup light at boot (either with or without disks), nothing on LCD screen, won't respond to any buttons. Mentions of similar problems elsewhere in the forums seem to always end with: completely broken, not recoverable.  (But if anyone knows differently, let me know!)

I actually have a couple of ReadyNAS Pro units (running Raidiator 4.x) at work.  Is there any chance that if I took the disks from the dead NV+ v2 unit (which I'm pretty sure was Raidiator 5) and put them in the Pro unit, it would be able to read the X-raid volumes?

P.S.  Examples of the problem I'm having:  Here and here

[Sandshark]

By just putting the drives into the Pro, no.  With the Pro updated to OS6, it is possible, but Netgear won't provide you any help with that configuration, and I think that's necessary.  Using a PC and R-Linux for Windows is probably your best solution.  I suppose you could also add the NV+ drives to a Pro system that already has a one-drive volume and use it as "just a Linux PC" via SSH to do recovery, but I can't point you to a specific process.

[elnjensen]

Thanks, @Sandshark !   That's what I suspected.  Is there documentation of the filesystem format anywhere?  I suspect there's nothing official since X-raid is proprietary, but it seems like there is a lot of informal collective wisdom here.  From the bits and pieces I've read it seems like the filesystem is ext3 (?) and it is maybe recognized by a Linux system as some kind of RAID config (not sure about the latter).  But I'm guessing it is striped at the block level (rather than, say, the file level) so that mounting a single disk at a time wouldn't yield anything useful - does that sound right?   If so I need to track down some enclosures for mounting all four disks, or some available space to image them all. 

I'm not even 100% sure there are any files I care about on there (it was mostly backups of other machines) so even getting a file listing would be useful if that information is recoverable. Then I could decide how much effort is warranted. 

Thanks for any other leads on this. 

[Sandshark]

XRAID format is not proprietary, it uses standard Linux formats.  In OS 4 & 5 models, that's LVM and EXT3/4.  On OS6, it's MDADM and BTRFS.  What's proprietary is the logic that takes care of the expansion for you instead of requiring you to know anything about those RAID and file system formats.

I've seen a few tutorials around about recovering data from OS4.x volumes, but info on OS5.x is harder to find, probably because Netgear sold a lot fewer of them.

ReclaiME should also work, but it's pricy.

[StephenB]

---

@Sandshark wrote:

ReclaiME should also work, but it's pricy.

---

Rstudio is much less expensive, and should work fine.  I think ReclaiMe is pricy because it supports BTRFS (which isn't used on the v2).

[elnjensen]

Thanks, very useful.  If it's just LVM, then I think my first step is just to try it on a Linux machine and see if it will mount the four disks and see the volume info, and if so, then I'll see if I can mount the logical volume.  

Any recommendations for a decent four-bay dock/enclosure to hook these up?