Dead NAS - Drives are good - Need to Retrieve Data

Hmm... does it give you the option of assigning a drive letter?

(Hope you have a good backup!)

Sure doesn't.. :(

In Disk Management does it show as a Foreign Disk? Or are the partitions showing as RAW or another format?

Yea, so they should be showing a file system type such as NTFS or FAT. Most likely something custom from the NAS device. The fact that the disk is showing in Windows means you might have some luck with data recovery software. You could also try partition repair software but that might make matters worse. Do you have a good backup or is this your only copy?

That's a great idea (running recovery software)..

Trying that now..

Good luck. I just hope it doesn't make matters any worse.

According to Cisco,those drives are EXT3, EXT4 file system.

I would get a boot disk from somebody like Knoppix and copy the data off to another drive.

http://knoppix.net/

Normally NAS is using one of Linux formats like mentioned above - ext3 or ext4.
You can use RAID reconstructor from Runtime to build the virtual emulation of thr RAID.  You will need a room on local storage to store the data. But it should work for you.
http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm

So should I cancel this recovery scan? You don't think it will provide any usable data / files?

It will not bring you much. So stop it. Use RAID reconstructor.

Yeah,if it's just doing NTFS ,you're not going to get anything worthwhile.

If it's just raid 1 ,don't even bother with RR, as the file system should just be mirrored and intact.

It's likely the partitions are a Linux file system.

Install this and see if you can then "see" the data:
http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/

If not, it's probably in a RAID arrangement, which is going to make this far more complex.

@pgm554, I booted off Knoppix on a VM and have one of the drives connected via USB dock but it's not showing up..

Does Knoppix support external USB drives?

@garycase, the volumes show up but when I click them it says "Cannot open disk: Volume 3 Check the disk and try again."

Also, it lists the volumes as "Linux native"

I presume from your question you don't have current backups ... so you want to be VERY cautious about doing ANYTHING that may reduce the likelihood of successful data recovery.

ANY operation that writes to the disks makes recovery less likely ... so I would NOT do any "checkdisk", partition repair utilities, etc.    Good data recovery software is always "data safe" -- i.e. it won't write to the disk you're recovering from; but since you don't even know the file systems involved that could be a very laborious process.

Your best bet for safe recovery is to send the drives off for professional recovery.   This is an excellent outfit with reasonable (by data recovery standards) pricing:
http://gillware.com/

I agree with you.. But, I'm not sending it off..

Using iCare Data Recovery it found tons of files, however, no file names etc so that's pretty useless..

I haven't made any changes or any writes..

I would attach the drive to a sata port on a PC,boot the Knoppix disk and see if it works that way.
Don't use a vm or usb dock drive,just eliminate as many variables as possible.

If the Knoppix thing doesn't work ,I believe Runtime has this:

http://www.runtime.org/nas-recovery.htm

What is the size of each HDD and how big was the available space on the NAS before it failed?
If it is really was RAID1 then the size of NAS must be identical to the size of single HDD.
In Linux you could need to mount it.

Both drives have the exact same partition sizes etc.. NAS Recovery or RR do anything for me..

It's showing as EXT4 in Knoppix via GPART but unmounted.. How do I mount it?

Thanks

http://agix.com.au/blog/?p=2905

Actually my question was asked to find out if the NAS was using RAID1 or RAID0. From your answer I did not understand - what is the size of each drive?
And how big was the storage of the NAS when you used it?

Nothing worked.. I actually ended up finding a 4 bay Cisco NAS that wasn't being used in production where I work and put the drives in that and voila.

Thanks for all the help..

Had to put drives in another same exact NAS.