Data Recovery and Disk Utilities Forum @R-TT

I am trying to do a recovery of data from a five-drive Netgear ReadyNAS that I understand is using Linux X-RAID2 and would like to know if I should use R-Studio or R-Linux to recover data from a supposed corrupt partition on the NAS? I have no info about the RAID parameters to use.

You may try both for free. R-Linux is free, and therefore should be tried first. R-Studio in its demo mode will allow you to do all recovery work except saving recovered files.

Thanks for the reply. I have a license for R-Studio so no problem recovering data if I can get the RAID parameters. R-Studio shows several virtual mdadm partitions, so does that help you give me a starting point? Thanks.

X-RAID2 is a mdamd RAID5, to my knowledge, so R-Studio should assemble them automatically.
1. What is a file system used in this NAS? ext4fs?
2. Can you post a screenshot of the Drives panel in R-Studio?

When you look at the attached screenshot you'll see at the bottom left several "virt-mdadm" sets. When I highlighted one of those, 5 HarddiskVolumes became highlighted in blue (amongst the 5 Seagate drives you see listed). I created a virtual block RAID 1 and added the blue volumes to that, but as yet I cannot tell if it has found any RAID parameters or what is going on. (the detection has only completed 3% after running 12 hours) I tried to place the drives in the same SATA port order as they were in the NAS, but I don't know if that matters. My recovery PC only had 4 SATA ports, so 2 drives are running from a SATA expansion card. These are the bottom 2 Seagate drives shown in the screenshot.

The original issue was 3 quick power outages that made the ReadyNAS lose the RAID config. All the drives are SMART healthy but I have about 1TB of pix I cannot lose and I assumed that trying to rebuild the array on the NAS would destroy the data. The original settings (as I remember) was set to an XRAID2 with dual redundancy (recover from 2 drive failures).

What do you recommend I do from here? Thank you for any suggestions since I know nothing about getting R-Studio to detect the RAID parameters. I ran the free ReclaiMe, also to no avail.

X-RAID2 creates mdadm RAIDs from other mdadm RAIDs. We plan to implement this feature in some next version.

So does this mean I probably won't be able to recover much now with R-Studio and these mdadm RAIDs? If this is true, do you know a product I could use now? Thanks.

I would create a virtual raid from the partitions of 1.81 TB and try to automatically find its parameters.

I recommend you to test our new version of R-Studio. It may assemble those RAIDs automatically.

Thank you. I'll update mine and see what I can do.