Freedom9 4020 NAS appliance running RAID 5 won't rebuild

[gnarmy]

Hello,

I recently went on Vacation and returned to discover my NAS (freedom9 4020, 4x500GB drives in RAID 5 = ~1.36TB of space, running IPstor) was acting up. This has happened before in the past and a power cycle seemed to fix it, not the case this time.

The first time I cycled the power (proper shutdown), the unit no longer accepted my credentials via the build in HTTP web console, or telnet/SSH (login/password stored in a password safe). At this point, I was able to access CIFS shares via SMB.

After the second power cycle, the unit is stuck booting (I've left it for 24 hours and it's still stuck). I suspected a drive failed, but no failure lights were illuminated. I then placed the drives in a Windows 7 system and tried to rebuild a virtual raid-5 array using R-Studio, this process took about 20 hours. At some point during the scan, SMART errors were encountered and logged in system events. This was no help as to what drive was having problems, as it only gave me model # (no serial) and the 4 drives are idential and were purchased together. I was able to isolate the drive by scanning each disk individually.

After determining that a drive was having problems, I went to my local computer store and purchased another drive of the same model #, hoping the fix would be simply swapping out the failed drive for the new drive, powering on and giving the unit some time to rebuild the array. This was not the case. The system was stuck on the same initialization page after I returned after 24 hours. I powered down the NAS, took out the "new" drive and scanned it with r-studio... it was fresh. no partitions were created. The "good" disks have 2 128 MB partitions, then a ~465GB partition.

When I plugged the drives into a system running Ubutnu 10.04, Disk Manager/parted saw "raid components" on the drives and gave me the option of initialzing the raid set (which I did not do, in fear it could tourch my data).

My question is, is there a way I can rebuild the array on my Ubuntu system, dump the contense to a 2TB drive, and hopefully have my data back? The device is not home to uber critical data, just stuff that will be hard/time consuming to get again.

I would bring this up with Freedom9, but they appear to be out of business.

Thanks!

[ppumkin]

You are most certainly heading in the right direction and taking all good precautions.
You can rebuild the array in linux. I cant find the the thread now but search for raid and linux - there's plenty of threads.. not all with any good information - but not long ago there was somebody in the same situation as you and managed to recovery his data using linux software to rebuild the raid.

Good luck