Hello everybody. I have this NAS box made out of 4 disks. The NAS system is a bit old, there's a "raidtool.conf" in the system partition, but it's 0 bytes long. There's another file which says "RAID LEVEL = -2". I've scanned the system partition (Ext2) on each disk, they're all the same and I found a deleted file (RAW file, I don't know if it was the raidtool.conf) which says that it is a RAID5+spare. If fact, taking a look with WinHex on each disk, it seems to be a RAID5+spare: I've got three disks which have parity between them (1 XOR 2 XOR 3 = 0 in most places) and another disk that is almost the same as one of the others-this one could be the spare one (used), or maybe the failed one... How to know?
Anyways, I found the stripe size, the order and the parity matrix, but I can't find any partition. I've made a RAW image with WinHex and I've opened it with UFSexplorer and R-Studio, and after scanning I don't get any file system -just some small ISO9660 FS's but I'm pretty sure that's because of some ISO images the owner had in the NAS.
Using WinHex, having a look to the image I did, it seems to be OK (big no-scattered text files, large amounts of data following the same pattern-and I'm using a 8-sectors stripe), but I can't get the file system. I think this is what is failing to me, because I've been able to recover large JPG's (1MB or larger) but ALL OF THEM have got like some wrong pixels or even lines in the upper-right corner. The JPG's are not OK if they are no larger than 100 KB, more or less...
Anybody could help me? R-Studio shows 3 partition in each drive, the important one is the 186GB one (542304 sectors offset), but looking inside them I see nothing before sector 558688 [16384 sectors further], and what I see then is not any partition information, is just rubbish... is it a LVM? In that case, how to recover it?
Thank you for your attention.

What is the NAS box model?

It's a Network Disk Comet Labs, ND-41000. The User's Manual says nothing helpful for me. It talks about NFS (Network File System, I assume, instead of Novell FS), but I think that's just the NFS Protocol, which nothing has to do with the manner in which data is distributed or allocated; it's just a file transfer protocol for the network...

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I'm working on this, I'm a pro, but this case is slipping through my fingers. I think that the owner messed up all the thing, he tried to do it himself before sending it to the company I'm working in. It seems that the spare disk was not copied from the other ones using the parity, it lileky was copied wrong or something because in so many places the data seems to go nowhere, it's lost. For example, I've got thousands of sectors in the RAID assembly going OK (and I'm using an 8-sectors stripe), but suddenly, there's some text such as "C/WINDOWS/SYST [end of sector]" and I can't find the "EM32/..." neither in the RAID assembly nor in any disk in a nearby sector, it's just gone. No i-Nodes, no MFT, no FAT, no anything. File System metadata out of sight, but I can recover the files as I would do for recovering RAW data and the resulting files have their names, last access... despite everything, those files are "a little bit corrupt". I can see some 3 MB JPG's and I can say that the 99,5% of the image is OK, there's only a block of pixels in the upper-right corner missing.
I think I'm going to try to assembly the RAID with 2 hard disks and I'll leave out the one I've got the feeling to be wrong.
Any hint is welcome.