NAS - Seagate BlackAmor 400 - Volume Failed

[Teris]

I've got a Seagate BlackAmor 400 NAS storage box with 2x 1.5tb Barracuda drives on RAID1. I cleared the recycle bin cache and restarted the device and now it reports the volume as failed.

I can see the shares if i browse to the root of the device but cant see any data in any of the shares...

Windows cannot read the drives because the file system that the box uses is a Linux varient. A Linux machine recognises the drives as a RAID configuration but i still cannot access his data. I've tried the drives on their own and together on both Windows and Linux.

I've tried to use the following to recover the data:

• P-Magic
• Partition Magic
• Seagate Recovery
• NAS recovery +

All of these have failed to restore the data...

Both drives have passes diagnostic tests and are reporting as good. The RAID configuration should have defended against this but apparently not. If anyone has any ideas it would be very much appreciated.

 

[Indigo]

Sounds like an issue with the NAS controller. Can you get a hold of Seagate and see if they have anything to offer? Unfortunately from the individual tests, if that is the case and the array is RAID 1, it does sound like it hosed the data. With RAID 1, you should be able to take the drives off the controller and read them as independent disks since for all purposes, they are just identical drives data-wise.

 

[Teris]

Seagate wanted me to use their recovery software which is rubbish, took 17 hours to find nothing! I've still got an open support ticket with them but they are messing around really; all their suggestions involve ultimately formatting the drives and losing all my data.

Windows cant see the drives because it's not NTFS or FAT and my Linux machine identified them but couldn't read them seperately or together. I've considered removing the RAID partition from one of the drives to see if it will read but i'm treating that as a last resort at the moment since if it fails i could well be buggered...

 

[Indigo]

Right, but RAID 1 itself doesn't carry any special read permission set. It's just data is mirrored evenly on both drives. If you take a drive out of the NAS and you can't read it from even the host environment (Linux in this case) then the data is FUBAR.) No amount of messing around with recovery software is going to get it back.

I've never had a problem with linux not being able to read data from a drive, you could try booting to the Mini Linux OS on the Hirens Boot CD, and see if it can mount the disk and read from it there. That's about the only thing I can think of at this point.

 

[Teris]

I've tried on Ubuntu and Fedora both of witch identified a single drive as a RAID volume but couldn't open it.

I'm not completely convinced of the file structure of the drive since Seagate use their own cackhanded system for storage that is unchangeable...

I'll give it another go tonight Mini Linux and see if i can mount the drive.

Cheers for your suggestions og, I'll let you know how it goes.