Suspected drive (drives?) failure on my NSA220PLUS - Help

[mcbod]

I have an NSA220PLUS with 2x1TB drives as a single Raid 1 volume
I had recently seen orange/red displays on one of the HHDs but it seemed to disappear again after a reboot
I then opened the web utility and I saw a "Degraded" status
I clicked the Scan button and this seemed to never complete (Hmm maybe I did not wait long enough?)

After a later reboot I ended up in my current bad place:

Booting with both drives in place:
* There IS a little repeating clicking (5 or 6 clicks)
* HDD1 Light ends up RED
* SYS Light continues to BLINK forever?
* CANNOT access web utility

Booting with only HDD1 in place:
* There is NO clicking
* HDD1 Light ends up RED
* SYS Light continues to BLINK forever?
* CANNOT access web utility

Booting with only HDD2 in place:
* There IS a little repeating clicking (5 or 6 clicks)
* HDD2 lights up green
* SYS lights up green
* CAN access web utility
* No volumes are visible

Any ideas?
I have a horrible feeling that both drives are dead?

[Mijzelf]

I also have a bad feeling about this. The blinking sys light is a powerup default. At the end of the startscript /etc/init.d/rcS the led is 'de-blinked'. Inside that script the raid array is assembled and mounted. I think the script somehow crashes/stalls here.

Clicking is bad, when it happens much. It means that the disk head has lost it's way and has to recalibrate by homing. Which often means that the mechanical system is at it's end.

Anyway, to get more info on this, you'll have to get the disks out, and connect them to a Linux computer (any PC booted from a Linux Live CD or -USB stick will do). Maybe it's possible to recover the data. Is the data worth the hassle?

[mcbod]

Thanks for your help

The data is just about everything I store digitally - every family movie, photo etc
Its all about getting this data back

[mcbod]

I am a bit linux-ly challenged. No such machine or skills
I could plug the drives into my windows pc? See if it recognises a volume?

I have a horrible feeling that the volume will be gone and I will end up running one of those file recovery programs that just manages to recover files by examining bytes and looking for data that looks like known file types

Has it really come to this

[Mijzelf]

I could plug the drives into my windows pc? See if it recognises a volume?

A Windows pc is limited. But it can see if the disk is recognized at all. If the disk doesn't show up at all, a Linux pc won't see it either.
Further it can see if the partition table is correct. There should be 2 partitions, one of about 500MB, and one containing the rest of the disk. *Do not* agree when Windows helpfully offers to 'initialize' the disk.

Some software exists which might be able to read the disks on a Windows PC. UFS Explorer can be helpful, although your disk probably has a ReiserFS filesystem, which is not supported, AFAIK.
Further a program like PhotoRec might be able to rescue your files, without any help of the filesystem.

But. If the disk is already dying, intensive surface scans might push it over the rim. The recommended way is to create a bit-by-bit copy on a new disk, and do the recovery from there. On a Linux system it's no problem to dump the disks in two files (assuming the disks are both readable) and do recovery on that files.

I have a horrible feeling that the volume will be gone and I will end up running one of those file recovery programs that just manages to recover files by examining bytes and looking for data that looks like known file types

Possible. And why is that horrible? It's horrible that you have valuable data without proper backup. It's great that software exists which can recover files without any help of the (possibly damaged) filesystem.

[mcbod]

Well I loaded up the 2 drives in my mac

One of them was recognised as a 1TB drive with a Failing status that could not be read
The other was recognised as a 4GB drive

Maybe I need to install something to allow Mac to read a ReiserFS volume first