Recovering a raid partition (ext3 -> NSFT)

Necronic · Feb 5, 2014

I bought a Seagate Black Armor NAS a while ago to back up all my stuff, lo and behold it failed within 3 years (Seagate: never again ). I removed the hard drive from the enclosure and hooked it up, only to find that it uses ext3 and has some weird internal RAID setup. I was able to burn an image of this using DiskInternals, then when I tried to mount the image I get a message saying that the drive has problems.

I run the recovery stuff in the software, which takes 5-6 hours and crashes 3 times, joy, and it finds the files. Wooohooo! But wait, to access the files I will need to purchase the software. Ok I think, this software did a good job and they deserve their money, how much?

250$

Nope. Not happening. So I find another program called ISOBuster that seems to be able to recover the files, but I don't know if it works until I pay 40$. And this one didn't ask if it was going after ext3 or NTSF or whatever, which makes me suspicious.

Anywho, for people that have experience with this I need some advice. I have a .dsk ISO of the ext3 RAID partition that has some bad sectors/corruption problems and needs to be recovered.

What software should I use?

PatrThom · Feb 5, 2014

This is all going to depend on which level of RAID was being used. 0? 1? 0+1? JBOD?
If there was only one internal hard drive, then none of the above matters.
If there were two, then it could be 0/1/JBOD

If it's RAID 0, you're pretty much hosed.
A quick Googling brought up this sorcery.

--Patrick

Ravenpoe · Feb 5, 2014

I have some experience in recovering from a raid wipe, but I don't think it's applicable here...

Necronic · Feb 5, 2014

PatrThom said:
This is all going to depend on which level of RAID was being used. 0? 1? 0+1? JBOD?
If there was only one internal hard drive, then none of the above matters.
If there were two, then it could be 0/1/JBOD

If it's RAID 0, you're pretty much hosed.
A quick Googling brought up this sorcery.

--Patrick

It's only a single internal hard-drive. I think it's set up for raid because the Black Armor NAS's could be either 1, 2, or 4 drives, so they just configured them all for RAID.

I don't know how you RAID a single drive though.

PatrThom · Feb 5, 2014

Necronic said:
It's only a single internal hard-drive. I think it's set up for raid because the Black Armor NAS's could be either 1, 2, or 4 drives, so they just configured them all for RAID. I don't know how you RAID a single drive though.

You don't (or rather, you shouldn't).

Just about any Linux LiveCD should be able to read ext3, but whether there's some sort of proprietary directory format involved as well is anyone's guess.
Short story is that it should be possible to do so, at the cost of whatever files have the damaged sectors.

--Patrick

Necronic · Feb 5, 2014

so what you're saying is that I need to learn to sudo?

PatrThom · Feb 5, 2014

Using the sudo command just tells the computer, "Ok, computer...this thing I'm about to tell you to do? I don't want any backtalk from you about how I'm not supposed to be able to do that, I just want you to DO it."

--Patrick

Ravenpoe · Feb 5, 2014

Necronic · Feb 6, 2014

Well, I went ahead and bought some software to do it for me called NAS Data Recovery. It cost 100$, which is a bit much, but it worked fast and flawlessly. I think I lost a grand total of 3 files on the whole hard drive. I can't imagine I will ever have another need for this software, but you never know.