unformat of RAID 0 Buffalo NAS drive

Discussions on using the professional data recovery program R-STUDIO for RAID re-construction, NAS recovery, and recovery of various disk and volume managers: Windows storage spaces, Apple volumes, and Linux Logical Volume Manager.
md96
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Feb 21, 2012 11:19 am

unformat of RAID 0 Buffalo NAS drive

Post by md96 » Tue Feb 21, 2012 11:55 am

I haven't yet found a similar situation in this forum.

Essentially, a Buffalo firmware update erased the file structure of my 1TB RAID 0 NAS drive (2 500GB drives in RAID 0). When I attach the drives to my PC, I can see 4 healthy partitions in Disk Manager on each drive. I have a paid/registered version of R-studio. Here are the steps I've taken (followed by my problems/questions):

1. Created images of each drive, in the order they were listed on the NAS motherboard.
2. Used R-Studio to make a virtual RAID 0. I believe the correct block size is 64. I left all the rest of the settings as default (and I'm not sure this is correct). [For instance, should I have identified offsets? Rather than move the whole disk image to the Virtual Raid, should I have used just the partitions with files, and which ones? Each disk image has 4 partitions: 1 for the NAS interface software, 2 with ??, and a 3rd with all my files]
3. Did a full scan of the virtual RAID looking for all file systems. I then had it look for "lost partitions" because it didn't find any but the new file systems (green), and saved a copy of the scan information.
4. The scan seemed to find the new file system (green partitions) and the 'missing' or 'old' partitions because it came up with many (maybe 50?) different orange/yellow partitions, some of which are larger than either disk (the biggest is 688GB and there are 2 of that size listed) and some listing FAT table entries of > 1 GB.
5. I read the manual, which said if I'm looking for files on formatted or drives without file systems, I should focus on the yellow/orange partitions. I've opened about a dozen of these and inside they do not have my old file system. Some have folders with gibberish names. Others have no folders. All have lots of files listed by file type. When I spot checked several .pdfs and/or .jpgs, and chose "recover" and copied them to another drive, none of the files were good.

So, now I'm stuck. Before I did the firmware update, I had no indication that there were drive errors. I've gotten no indication that there are bad sectors/errors on these drives. I don't know why r-studio can't reconstruct the old file system, and why the files it does find appear to be corrupted.

Specific questions:
1. Is it possible I chose the wrong options during the rebuild of the virtual raid, and that's why my files/file system can't be rebuilt? How can I go about figuring out the correct settings to rebuild the RAID?
2. I noticed that all of the 'lost' partitions that r-studio found were listed as FAT32. But, when I used UFS Explorer to scan the images (and when I look at the default for Buffalo drives), it seems the correct file system should be XFS. I don't know much about file systems, but we have both Linux and Windows machines on our home network, so in the Buffalo interface, we chose to have shares available for both Win and Mac machines. I'm wondering if Buffalo creates multiple file systems to allow interoperability, and that's why there are so many partitions (4 on each drive) and so many possible file systems found during the "lost" scan (again, about 50).
3. Any other suggestions of next steps?

Thanks for any ideas!

md96
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Feb 21, 2012 11:19 am

Re: unformat of RAID 0 Buffalo NAS drive

Post by md96 » Tue Feb 21, 2012 11:56 am

Oh... and I was using R-Studio build 5.4...134. Perhaps updating to the most recent and rescanning would address this problem? If so, would I need to re-do the scan, or could I load the saved scan information?

Alt
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Joined: Tue Nov 11, 2008 2:13 pm
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Re: unformat of RAID 0 Buffalo NAS drive

Post by Alt » Wed Feb 22, 2012 9:20 am

Looks like the Buffalo NAS series uses the XFS file system. Currently, R-Studio doesn't work with the XFS file system. Sorry.

md96
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Feb 21, 2012 11:19 am

Re: unformat of RAID 0 Buffalo NAS drive

Post by md96 » Wed Feb 22, 2012 9:47 am

Thanks!

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