Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

Hello. I am facing more or less the identical situation you faced. ReadyNAS NV+, 4 1Tb drives. The disk that was producing errors was not identified except by "??". I was told by Level 2 support at Netgear to put the NAS into Tech Support mode. They told me to enter Tech Support mode from the Boot Menu by depressing and holding the internal reset button on the back of the NAS. This resulted in the following messages on the display: "TFTP ARD Error - Retry: kernel_init". This set of messages was repeated several times as I continued holding the reset button. The boot menu never appeared as it was supposed to. Then I saw that the instructions on the ReadyNAS site say that the Boot Menu is accessed not by depressing the reset button, but by starting the NAS and keeping the *Start* button depressed. I did this and was able to enter Tech Support mode.

Level 2 support escalated the case to Level 3 and in about two days reported that two of the disks have bad sectors. I was told to remove them and clone at least one of them, then to replace the defective disk with the clone and boot the NAS. I cloned both defective disks, and reinserted Disk 3, then rebooted. When I did I received a message saying "C:/ 0/0 Gb available", then another saying "Volume C:/ is dead." Again like you, Disk 1, one of the healthy disks, showed 0 volumes while the other two seemed to have the correct number of volumes.

I was told to go back into Tech Support mode and wait for instructions. I should mention here that in Tech Support mode, Netgear support has telnet access to the NAS, which is how they determined which disks were defective. Again after a couple of days, I received an e-mail from another Level 3 tech support person telling me basically to do what I had already done - clone a disk, insert the cloned disk, and reboot. They also asked me to open Port 23 on the NAS and send them the IP address of the NAS. I repeat that this is at a point after which I had already done all this and was waiting with the NAS in Tech Support mode - thus there's no need for me to open a port and provide the IP, since they already have telnet access to the NAS. I called the Level 2 support person back and he checked and confirmed that they have access to the NAS.

I am now waiting for the Level 3 support person to get up to speed and actually try to access the NAS, which he clearly had not done, and realize by reading the case that I had already done what he was telling me to do. Meanwhile I'm beginning to wonder if my attempt to enter Tech Support mode via the Boot Menu using the reset button instead of the Power button (as I was instructed to do) is not the cause of the loss of the volumes on Drive 1.

NOW, having found your thread, I'm hoping that some variant of the method you used might be able to work for me. I'm beginning to get the feeling that like you, I won't get any real help from Netgear support. Any suggestions you have would be most welcome. Reading your account, I gather that I might be able to make images of the disks and then recover the data from the images under Ubuntu. I'm willing to try it, but I need to know a little more about how you made your images. Did you leave the disks in the NAS or did you attach them to a Ubuntu computer? Is there any way I might access the disks over the network while still in the NAS and run R-Suite?

Any suggestions are more than welcome.

Netgear advices me to do a software reinstall of the netgear 2100... seems to me it will reduce my recovery options.
any ideas anyone?

I have exactly the same problem, do you still have the manual for the linux recovery?
the link you posted FrankDMI

you would be a life saver if you could help me out

Hi,

many thanks for your post.
Just one question: could you please specify how have you restored the "Volume Table" on disk 2 ("Drive 2 is ok but shows no volumes") in step 9?

Thanks

Giorgio

[b]Joy of Joy - Successful Recovery of data from Netgear ReadyNas NV+ running X-Raid[/b]

Thanks to some digging around, logic and a failed attempt by Kroll Ontrack to recover data we have managed to recover all my data using Ubuntu and R-Studio.

Let me recap the original situation:

1 - ReadyNas NV+ Box running 4x1Tb drives in X-Raid Mode started to grind to a halt.
2 - Since the RadyNas Box didn't specify what drive was failing and ground to a halt I had no choice (foolishly with hindsight) but to try and pull out one drive at a time to see if the Box would reeboot and work out which drive was faulty.
3 - Because of this action the ReadNas NV+ Box did some "funny things" and resulted in showing me the Volumes but telling me that they were not available. The screen at the front told me 0/0...I THOUGHT THAT WAS IT
4 - Took my ReadyNas box to Kroll Ontrack and told them that the system was running on X-Raid (which I took to mean a form of RAID 5)
5 - Kroll Ontrack confirmed that one of the drives was partially corrupt and they could only image it at 85% but the other 3 drives were fine
6 - After 2 weeks they came back and said that they only managed to recover 1/3 of the files that I was supposed to have and told me that they were seeing the Disks as Striped NOT as Raid 5??? Anyways the data they could recover was useless to me so I thanked them and only paid for the diagnostic. At this point I would like to say that Kroll Ontrack were extremely professional, were always available to answer my questions and gave me regular updates...just didn't succeed with recovering all the data.
7 - Having got the RadyNas NV+ Back and under the suggestion of Kroll Ontrack, I made Images of all 4 drives using R-Studio Network and used the Byte by Byte Image copy to copy the 4 disks onto 2 3TB USB external drives. The R-Studio Image copy for the 4th drive I put the parameters of 20 attempts to read sector failures. Each drive took around 6 hours to image.
6 - R-Studio showed me that 3 of the 4 drives had 4 volumes and one drive had 0 volumes (the drive with 0 volumes was not the corrupt 4th drive but one of the good ones), also I could see that this second drive had data on it!
7 - Doing a lot of research on the internet (I had 2 weeks of twiddling my thumbs) I found that the ReadyNas NV+ box is bascally running linux and that people had success in connectig the drives and viewing content on Ubuntu.
8 - I called my friend Steve at Regenology and since they do hosting I thought that he might be able to help as he knows a lot about Linux for obvious reasons.
9 - The first thing he did was to copy the Volume Table from one of the images that had a Volume Table to the image of the drive that didn't have the Volume Table (we saw that the volume tables were identical for all 3 drives). The loss of this volume table on drive 2 was probably caused by the ReadyNas NV+ box Initializing the disk when I was doing the drive swap test!
10 - The next thing we did was to mount these images in Ubuntu, including the partially corrupt one, and using the "kpartx -a" command in the terminal (this is where it all got too technical for me) followed by a "vgscan" VOLUME C appeared!!!! This has all the DATA!!!. This was the guiding article - [url]http://home.bott.ca/webserver/?p=306[/url]
11 - After listing the folders in this volume and determining the size (just to make sure that data was there) we "rsync" all the data onto an external Drive

Next thing I will try is to do the volume table rebuild on the the physical drive 2 from the ReadyNas box, see if it boots with the 3 good drives and then throw in a 4th drive (in place of the corrupt one) and let it do what it is supposed to do and re-sync all the data - Even though I seem to have all the data now anyways I have learnt my lesson and doubling on everything.

Also I haven't been able to determined if the corrupted Disk 4 data has affected any of the files that I have recovered via this method. But in theory the ReadyNas box should rebuild everything....but now I am not afraid to try!!

A big thanks to R-Studio for giving me to tool to clone the drives (in an easy way) and also cloning the corrupt drive.
A big thanks to Kroll Ontrack, even though they didn't manage to get the data, they still gave me information that allowed me to think of this...and didn't have to spend a fortune!
A big thanks to the forums and the internet
A big thanks for nothing to Netgear for being USELESS in their support
A big thanks to this forum - Alt and magicm
[b]And finally a huge thanks to Steve at Regenology [url]http://regenology.co.uk/[/url] for doing the terminal work in Ubuntu [/b](we used Google Chrome Remote Desktop App for him to access my computer)

I will let you know how I get on with the ReadyNas box when I do the physical rebuild....see if it works.

[b]The main lesson learnt is BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP...Cloud, Physical, Remote...DO NOT RELY on just one medium[/b]

Frankdmi, I was successful with getting all the data back. I would highly recommend ReclaiMe to find the RAID parameters needed by R-Studio to recover the data.

[quote="frankDMI"]Hi all, I have a quick question, specially for people with readynas x-raid experience. If a drive get Initialized does that mean that all the data is wiped on the disk or just the MBR (or linux equivalent)...I have a horrible suspicion that one of the good drives was initialized by the readynas box.[/quote]
Most like not, but that depends. Just browse through the disk using R-Studio's editor. If it all 00 or FF, the data is gone.

Hi all, I have a quick question, specially for people with readynas x-raid experience. If a drive get Initialized does that mean that all the data is wiped on the disk or just the MBR (or linux equivalent)...I have a horrible suspicion that one of the good drives was initialized by the readynas box.

OK, just send me an email, if necessary.

Thanks for your suggestion Alt and also magiccm for your link...I did read your post and am eagerly awaiting your response on your success (good luck).

One of the issues that I have is that one of my RAID disks has lost its volume information and combining that with a 4th disk that is partially corrupted, it isnt making life easy.

Tomorrow I have a friend that will log into my ubuntu and he is going to try and rebuild the missing data volumes on disk 2, by copying the layout of the other disks, and if he succeeds then in theory I could rebuild the system...here is me wishing.

If this fails I will take you up on your offer Alt.

Thanks for helping a noob.

Cheers

Frank