2 Hard Disk Failures on ReadyNAS 1100 - What are my options

[ecsaschar]

Hello,

On Monday of this week we experienced loading issues on the ReadyNAS. When looking in front view it's showing 2 out of the 4 hard disks as "dead". It's in a RAID 5 configuration. Do I have any options to recover the data or replace a hard drive and rebuild. The unit is currently in life support mode.

What's my best option at this point?

I can send logs, screenshots, etc. as needed.

Thanks in advance for your help!
Aaron

[ReadySECURE]

Clone the two dead disks and then try to restart the RAID in the same order you had it before. You can start it with just 1 disk cloned, and the other out, but I recommend cloning both.

[ecsaschar]

Hi readysecure,

Thanks for your reply. That sounds promising. Is there a good cloning software you recommend?

Best,
Aaron

[ReadySECURE]

This is a copy and paste from an older document. I was literally re-writing the instructions as you replied 😛

The old one I am converting is as follows:

Simple Hard Drive Recovery
Here is a simple guide to quickly recover a failed drive using dd_rescue.
I often have to deal with pesky failed drives, so here is a quick simple guide how to achieve this with a free Linux Live CD and a PC with two SATA connections.
I will be using a Knoppix 6.2 Live CD for this guide. Can be found at www.knoppix.net
Using dd_rescue command allows you to copy data from one drive to another block for block. This is especially useful for recovering a failed drive. Often when a drive fails, the drive is still accessible; it has just surpassed the S.M.A.R.T. error threshold. dd_rescue allows you to ignore the bad sectors and continue cloning the bad drive to a new healthy drive.
Record the serial numbers of you old and new drive.
1) Connect your old drive and new drive to your PC
2) Boot up using your Linux live CD
3) Launch a terminal window.
4) Run fdisk -l to make sure the system sees both of the hard drives.
5) Run hdparm -i /dev/sdx on both of the drives where "x" is variable and usually is an "a" or "b" depending on which disk it detects first. Use the serial number to find which drive is your source drive and which drive is your destination drive
6) Once you know which drive is which you can start the clone process.
dd_rescue /dev/sdx(source disk) /dev/sdx(destination drive)
7) You will see the process start, just keep an eye on it, it might take a few hours for the clone job to finish, depending on the size of the drive.
Once the process is complete, there will be no notification, the transfer will just stop and you will see the terminal prompt again.
If you see a lot of errors or see that there is no more data being shown as succxfer: it means the drive got marked faulty by the kernel. At this point reboot the system and make sure you know which drive is which again, as it is possible they lettering might switch. Run the dd-rescue command again but this time with -r option. This will start the cloning again but this time will start from the back of the drive and will make sure to get the data that has not been cloned yet.
There is no guarantee this will recover your data, but there is a very high chance this will work and it’s free…

[ecsaschar]

Hi readysecure,

Thanks for all the help.

At the end of day yesterday, the ReadyNAS was showing 3 out of 4 disks, "dead". I then updated to the latest firmware and let the file system check run overnight. When I came in this morning the file system check had completed and 3 out of 4 disks were showing normal. I removed and readded the "dead" disk 4 and it is resyncing.

It looks like the system will recover and so far there are no signs of data loss.

Best,
Aaron

[ecsaschar]

Hi readysecure,

I may need those instructions after all. The ReadyNAS is now showing corrupt root and the IP settings are reset to default. Currently, I'm unable to get into the web console... Even after attempting a O.S. re-install is seems to be the same.

Aaron