Broken RAID Recovery?

[darkfibre]

Hi there,

I am desperate for someone's help...hoping someone can assist.

I bought an external Buffalo Quad Station about a month ago. It was part of a power outage and the device showed 4 red lights beside all 4 drives. I called Buffalo and they advised that the RAID 5 array became corrupt and suggested I try out UFS Explorer.

I have connected up the drives and I believe I have found the correct order because the partition reads as approximately 2TB out of about 5.5TB (4 x 2TB disks in total).

But as illustrated in the screenshot. the last entry in the tree reads as "Unknown file system (2047.99 GB partition)"



Direct Link: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/16/hddk.jpg/

How can I get to view this partition and its files so I can copy them over to another external drive?



Any assistance would be so appreciated.

Thanks

[HDD Spaz]

have you identified the starting sector, parity rotation and block size?

[northwind]

I believe Buffalo's suggestion was a little irresponsible.

It isn't as simple as "plug the disks into a machine and run ufs and there you go".

You need professional assistance to get through this. As HDD Spaz says, someone with knowledge must identify disk order, parity, block size etc. Then the raid can be destriped onto a new disk and recover data from there.
To me, the 2TB partition underneath "RAID" is completely wrong. Also, i can see the 4 disks have different partition size. Are these different models? It is weird if there were different drive models onto a RAID enclosure.

To me, this needs A LOT of work.

If you wish to get remote assistance from a pro (paid), then there are members in this forum that can make wonders.

[darkfibre]

Thanks for the replies.

I agree, the Buffalo technician wasn't very helpful. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty but just require some guidance along the way (which the Buffalo tech couldn't provide).

I don't believe I have identified the starting sector, parity rotation and block size. Could someone advise how I can do this? I have pulled up the following link, which I have used as a rough guide to help me through it:

http://www.ufsexplorer.com/inf_terastation.php

I know it's not the same model, but I assume the steps are similar.

The way I identified the order of drives was based on the fact that I have connected each drive to my PC via USB to SATA. The drives are all identical (Seagate 2TB Greens) and numbered by manufacturer. I connected each drive to my PC one at a time via USB in drive order (it would appear in the UFS tree). That is how I identified the order of drives. If this is an incorrect way of doing so, please could someone advise.

As you can see, I am new to this forum. I hope I am able to contribute a solution to this problem and share it. I am willing to work with a pro on this, but would like to exhaust my options on here also.

[mr_spokk]

Hi, as you don't know how assembling a Raid works I suggest you'll stop right now...before you make it worse and unrecoverable.
Contact Sean member5866.html He's in Peterborough, and he can help you out with it.

Cheers
Bosse

[hddguy]

Firstly there is an offset to identify. Next you need to identify the order of the disks. Block Size for striping also needs to be confirmed in addition to the Parity Distribution Algorithm, whether it left or right (a)synchronous.

Other problems can include file-system damage, all members may not be totally in sync depending on any previous failures.

FYI the last Buffalo QUAD I worked on had offset of 14010368, but often this can vary.

[darkfibre]

Hi hddguy,

I'm not able to reply to your PM, which I believe is because I am new. Is there another way I can get in contact with you?

Thank you very much for your offer to assist, you don't understand how grateful I am!

[darkfibre]

Will do that this evening hddguy, many thanks

[darkfibre]

FYI hddguy - added.