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NAS crashed, Unable to access data on 4 HDD, please help!

Posted: 08 Jul 2015, 20:57
by mattforum
Hi everyone! First post here, I'm not an expert so please don't be rough guys :D

My 4 bay NAS: http://www.buffalotech.com/products/net ... n-pro-quad, crashed last weekend, apparently due to a controller failure (according to the Tech Support Agent I just talked with, they offered a replacement unit). I have 4 drives: 2x4TB WD 1x3TB WD and 1X2TB WD, full with HD movies in a JBOD configuration (no raid required as I only turn on the NAS when I use my Home Cinema setup, being shut down 99% of the time).

After the crash (red light blinking on the unit) all the shares I had configured disappeared, and under the storage tab of the web control panel all HDD's showed up displaying the right capacity of the drives, but indicating 100% free space (although they were full).

My guess is that when the NAS malfunctioned it somehow damaged the partitions, MBR, Filesystem, whatever ....and although I'm not able to access the data, they should still be there.

I removed all drives from their trays, put them in usb enclosures and hooked them up to a laptop running Gparted LIve CD. All drives are incapable of being mounted, and after running TestDisk and Analyzing the drives, different partitions show up.

What I want to do is to dump all the files inside each disk to an external USB drive, then reinsert the first drive into the new NAS, format it and then transfer all the files backed up in the USB drive back to the Nas... I know, time consuming and pedestrian at best, but I don't think the new NAS will be able to read the drives at all.

Here are some screen captures of the results of the analisys performed over one of the drives, I'm totally clueless on what to do next in order to access the folders where the movies are, and then be able to back them up to the external HDD.

Any suggestion will be most appreciated, this may sound dumb but this is my first issue with non microsoft filesystems and NAS servers, and I'm lost :(

Thanks in advance for your patience and, hopefully, your help.

Matt.
Madrid-Spain.

Re: NAS crashed, Unable to access data on 4 HDD, please help

Posted: 21 Jul 2015, 11:15
by mattforum
Hi folks, Any ideas? I've been travelling the last days and haven't returned home yet, and I still don't know how to proceed with the recovery of my drives.

Thank you for any input.

Matt.