the.evilkarl.net

So two weeks or so ago I had a red light show up on my Thecus N299 NAS box..this light indicated something was not good (red usually does). I thought I had lost the 700gb or so of data on there and was most unhappy.

I fired one disk up at the time by attaching it to a sata/ide to usb adapter and thought well the other disk must be the broken one..this was a bad assumption as I found out on sunday when I did the same with the second disk, both the disks were fine I could read the partion table of both and when I fired the disks up seperately on while attached to my mythtv box it seemed to be part of some RAID array. So I downloaded the System Rescue CD, attached the two drives to my main machine and boot it up and at the end of dmesg output (always handy) i noticed two arrays were recognised so I mounted the first one (md0) and it seemed to be the OS for the nas as well as some log files which seem  to indicate the device had detected the filesystem or something on one disk was not all good and removed it from the volume thus breaking itself. I mounted the second array md1 and was able to see all the directories for data on the disk and was then able to copy files off it to another seperate disk (didn’t want to risk ntfs write to OS drive). I didn’t take all the files just the ones I knew I would want in the short term I plan to build a proper file server with redundancy and will copy the rest off when that is built.

So If your Thecus N299 seems to fail I would suggest grabbing down the system rescue CD, attaching the two drives to another machine, booting  the cd and try recovering the data.