Broken Lacie 1.5TB NAS - can't recover 10 files

[MarkC99]

Hi
This is my first post into this forum - you guys certainly seem to know what you are talking about!

I wonder if you can help a mere mortal with something that is stressing me very much.

I have 1.5TB Lacie 2Big Network NAS which was set up as Raid 1 (Mirrored) - that is before I had a power surge which has killed the unit. I contacted Lacie and they were not too much help. I wanted to buy exactly the same NAS and just plug the old disks into the new box but was told they don't sell the old boxes any more.

I had to then get a bit techie and quickly getting out of my depth...

I have plugged the drives one at a time into my SATA plug in my PC and the disks appear to be fine. Using UFS Explorer I have now managed to recover all but 10 files of about 20,000 files and copied them to my new 2TB 2Big Network2 NAS. Trouble is there is 1 particular file out of these 10 that I desperately need and I cannot recover it from either of the drives by using UFS Explorer. The software can see the file, can see that it has a file size, but fails when I try to copy it anywhere.

The file is a file created by a little known piece of software, however there are lots of this type in the 20,000 that I have been able to recover so file type does not seem to be an issue.

Do you think if I could get hold of an old version 1.5TB Lacie Drive I would have a chance of recovering the one file I so desperately need?

Should I chance plugging the 2 old disks into the new NAS?

Is there any other software that would be better to try?

I feel that I am running out of options and I will have to do about 300 hours work to reconstruct the data in the missing file so you can see I am getting quite depressed over this this.

Thank you to anybody if you can help me.

Mark

[Mijzelf]

I can think of 2 reasons why those files cannot be read:
1) The power outage destroyed them.
2) The files are stored in a way (fragmented, or some special inode) that the implementation of the filesystem in UFS-explorer can't decode it.

In case 1 you could, depending on the nature of the data, try to use PhotoRec to recover them. But I don't know if it will be easy to find those 10 files between the 20000 other ones, as it is perfectly possible that PhotoRec can recover the files, but not their names.
In case 2 you could boot your PC from a Linux Live CD or -USBstick, and use it to read the disk. (Linux has native support for XFS, it is also the OS of almost every NAS).

Theoretically you could also use your 2Big2 for it, by connecting a disk to the eSata- or USB port, but unfortunately the half RAID1 partition will not be automounted, so you'll first have to hack the 2Big2 to get shell access, and to mount the partition manually.

With a live CD you'll have to mount it manually too, BTW, but getting a shell is much easier.

It is not useful to put the 2Big disks in a 2Big2. The OS is on the disk, and it's not compatible, so the 2Big2 won't even boot. (BTW, maybe another 2Big wouldn't boot either, because Lacie did something disgusting with partition identifiers)

When you want to connect the disk to a (Ubuntu) Live CD, use the following commands in a shell (terminal, command prompt) (assuming that the Lacie disk is the 2nd harddisk):

Code: Select all

# create mountpoint
mkdir /tmp/mountpoint
# mount the partition
sudo mount -t xfs -o ro /dev/sdb2 /tmp/mountpoint

If this works, you can use the GUI to find your files in /tmp/mountpoint. If it doesn't work, you'll have to assemble the raidarray first (you'll need internet access):

Code: Select all

sudo  apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mdadm
sudo mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sdb2 --run
mkdir /tmp/mountpoint
sudo mount -t xfs -o ro /dev/md0 /tmp/mountpoint

[MarkC99]

Thank you for your very quick and very helpful reply. I will try these things and report back asap.

Thanks again.

[MarkC99]

Hi
Thank you again for your advice. My disk was identified as sda1.
I followed your code right up to
sudo mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sda1 --run

this gave

mdadm: no recognisable superblock on /dev/sda1
mdadm: /dev/sda1 has no superblock - assembly aborted

Is there anything else I can do?