NAS advice urgently required

[VladD]

Hi guys,

I've a client whose NAS has died. The drives appear fine, and I'm guessing it's the controller card that is giving the issue, as it's GUI is inaccessible.

I've attempted to mount the constituent drives in a PC, but realized that it won't work - i believe that the controller in the device is a promise ns4300n.

The client is a small charity that does a lot of good work, and I'm trying to save them from having to spend a fortune on data recovery and get them up and running again. My questions really are as follows:

Will I have to acquire a promise controller in order to remount these things?
Can I acquire a similar NAS enclosure, eg, using the same controller, and expect the raid to mount without much ado?
Is there anything else that you can suggest to me?

I'm grateful for any help you can give us at this point.

Many thanks.

Vlad.

 

[onetech4all]

Re:

You could buy a similar NAS enclosure and try to rebuild the RAID on it with those HDDs. Be careful when you do this, you might lose your data.
What RAID type were they using?

 

[VladD]

It's raid-5. I'm hoping on some advice on how to mount these drives in a computer using linux or perhaps some guidance on how to transfer these drives to a working unit without losing this data.

 

[MrUnknown]

I believe R-Studio is made to recover RAID. If the disks are fine, it should be a fairly simple process.

edit: R-Studio offers a demo mode that does everything but actually copy the data, so you can see if it will recover it before buying it.

 

[ITMAN]

you could also try ZAR (cant remmebre the rest) but I know it also has a RAID recovery ootion

 

[VladD]

Thanks guys, I took a look at those two packages, but I'm not convinced that they'd even mount the raid, I guess I'm stuck with referring my client to an expensive dedicated data-recovery outlet. The problem will be mounting the raid, which is hardware-raid5 on a promise hardware controller, then mounting the lvm under it - I'm not sure this is possible anymore.

I'm frustrated that the manufacturer, who sells this unit through major distributors, won't offer any support. I was told to call their technician's mobile, then when I told the guy on the phone he wasn't answering his phone or email; he said that the technician was out of the country, and to call him later today.

Next time I'll be careful who I buy from, that's for sure.

 

[JRDtechnet]

I second R-Studio, make images of each drive and then run them though R-Studio. If helps if you know the stripe size of the array and the order of the drives if not it's a process of trial and error. Either way it's a time consuming process especially with 4-5 drives having to be cloned and you have to make sure you have enough storage for the images. I know it's a charity but charities make a lot more money then you would think. Make sure you are compensated adequately for your troubles, I would charge at least $1000 for something like that (double if it weren't a charity) and I believe that price is well below what an data recovery firm would charge for raid recovery.

If you want I can do it $750.00, you can charge your customer whatever fair price so you can make some money too.

 

[VladD]

Thanks, JRD, but I think getting 4TB of data from here to you would be untenable really, plus the manufacturer won't even talk to me, let alone give me the technical details of the storage. All I know is that it's a linux-based NAS, hardware raid, promise controller and LVM.

I'm going to raw image the hard drives in the morning, and then try and assemble the raid under linux using mdadm, I'll figure out the LVM procedure if and when I can do that.

I thought I was dealing with a reputable company when I bought the NAS, but it's looking like they're cowboys. I now know what Tommy Lee-Jones meant when he said he "got sick and tired of coming up with last-minute desperate solutions to impossible problems created by other ******** people"