recovering raid 1 disk

catbbq

I am new to this forum, so I apologize if it is the wrong place for this post.

I have a problem. I bought a Maxtor Shared Storage II a few months ago. It is a 2 disk NAS capable of RAID 1. My intention was to use it as an archive with the RAID 1 providing some protection. The drives are not user serviceable.

Last month it stopped responding. I went through tech support and couldn't get it back online. He suggested I send it in for warranty replacement but my data would be destroyed. I asked what the point of RAID 1 on a device with non-user serviceable drive? He didn't have a good answer and suggested I work with their data recovery team.

In lieu of that, I decided to crack it open and put the drives in a new enclosure, assuming at least 1 of the drives was still good. The symptoms of the device failure lead me to believe it was a controller issue, not a drive issue.

Now I have it open, but can't get the data off easily. The Maxtor device uses ext3 filesystem. I have tried mounting the drive in a ubuntu vm image. I can see the directory structure, but not the actual files. I have tried ext2fsd and ext2ifs with similar results.

I finally found an application called RAID Recover from DiskInternals.com that looks like it will work. Their evaluation app was able to see the files and bring them up in a preview. But the app is $250.

Isn't there a somewhat easy free way to recover data from a RAID 1 disk?

Thanks.

QCH

WOW... what a pain. In most RAID-1 setups the advantage is that you can swap out the bad drive with another identical drive. The RAID controller would then sync the two drives without any intervention.

By making it "not user serviceable" and then using some sort of psdo-Linux file structure, it kinda of makes is a Waste. Any Linux guys want a crack at this?

shwaip

Does your ubuntu vm have mdadm installed?

If not:

sudo apt-get install mdadm

once that's installed, you can try the tutorial here:

http://www.howtoforge.com/recover_data_from_raid_lvm_partitions

I've never done it, but it looks like it's probably what you would want to do.

catbbq

shwaip wrote:

Does your ubuntu vm have mdadm installed?

If not:

sudo apt-get install mdadm

once that's installed, you can try the tutorial here:

http://www.howtoforge.com/recover_data_from_raid_lvm_partitions

I've never done it, but it looks like it's probably what you would want to do.

Yeah, I tried that based on this article. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8874

That is how I was able to see the directory stucture, but not the files. What else?

shwaip

did you try both of the drives separately? It's possible that one of the drives failed and the other is ok.

Snarkasm

Any chance you can get another compatible controller, since you think that's what was broken, and sync them back up again?

shwaip

It sounds to me like it's linux software raid.

Snarkasm

Ah, nuts.

ardichoke

If you have some disk space available on your system you could try using dd to dump an image of one of the disks then mount the image under a directory and see if you can pull data off it that way. It would probably be safer than using tools directly on the disks and risking destroying your data. I'm not sure what else to suggest though.

Nate_LapT

being Raid1 is a mirror a software raid shouldnt mean anything being they will be identical for how the data is dumped on the drives, not like its a Raid0. Just had fun recovering one of those recently. Had to get the old controller to get the data.

Being its ext3 you should be able to mount the drive then access the data, unless they encrypted your data also then you'll have some issues which I'm not familiar in that field.

There is an app called Raid Reconstruct which will recover Raid0 and 5, Raid 1 doesnt really need a raid controller to recover, you should just be able to throw the drive in any controller and grab the data.