Netgear X-RAID2 Recovery

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.
magicm
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Netgear X-RAID2 Recovery

Post by magicm » Thu Sep 27, 2012 11:07 am

Does anyone know if R-Studio supports Netgear's X-RAID2? Will I have to create a custom RAID type or can I use one of the preset configurations? I need to recover data from a Netgear NAS. I have all the drives imaged and know the correct order of the drives.

Thanks for any help.

Alt
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Re: Netgear X-RAID2 Recovery

Post by Alt » Thu Sep 27, 2012 12:05 pm

Netgear X-RAID2 uses their own variant of RAID5 and the Linux Ext2/Ext3 file system, so, generally R-Studio should be able to work with it. The problem is that you have to find the RAID parameters. And yes, it should be a custom RAID configuration.

magicm
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Re: Netgear X-RAID2 Recovery

Post by magicm » Thu Sep 27, 2012 12:36 pm

Alt, thanks for the quick response! What's the best way to go about finding the RAID parameters? Given I know the drive order, do I only need to find out the offset, block size, and block order in order to do a custom config? The Admin could only tell me that the RAID was set up with default settings. By the way, the RAID was in a ReadyNAS 3200.

Thanks for any help.

Alt
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Re: Netgear X-RAID2 Recovery

Post by Alt » Fri Sep 28, 2012 3:04 am

magicm wrote:Alt, thanks for the quick response! What's the best way to go about finding the RAID parameters? Given I know the drive order, do I only need to find out the offset, block size, and block order in order to do a custom config? The Admin could only tell me that the RAID was set up with default settings. By the way, the RAID was in a ReadyNAS 3200.

Thanks for any help.
Yes, you do need to find out those parameters and create a custom config.
You may ask the Netgear's techsupport about the parameters, but almost always they aren't a a great help.
You may follow the guidelines described in the article Finding RAID parameters, but it's about the NTFS file system, so you'll have to find the patterns yourself.

magicm
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Re: Netgear X-RAID2 Recovery

Post by magicm » Fri Sep 28, 2012 8:51 am

Alt wrote:Netgear X-RAID2 uses their own variant of RAID5 and the Linux Ext2/Ext3 file system, so, generally R-Studio should be able to work with it...
The admin was able to provide me with output from some command he ran, and it actually shows the "Raid level" as RAID6. Is that because it's X-RAID is RAID5, and X-RAID2 is RAID6? If I can determine the RAID parameters, is R-Studio going to have a problem with it being RAID6?

Thankfully, the output also should "Layout" as left-symmetric, and "Chuck Size" as 64k.

Alt
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Re: Netgear X-RAID2 Recovery

Post by Alt » Fri Sep 28, 2012 1:45 pm

R-Studio supports RAID6, both with presets and custom-created. You may read about that in R-Studio's help: Working with RAID 6 Presets and Working with Advanced RAID 6 Layouts.

magicm
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Re: Netgear X-RAID2 Recovery

Post by magicm » Fri Sep 28, 2012 2:55 pm

Alt, I really appreciate you taking the time to promptly respond to my posts. Hopefully, once the imaging is done, everything will go smoothly.

manel

Re: Netgear X-RAID2 Recovery

Post by manel » Mon Oct 15, 2012 3:33 am

Did you solve it?
I have the same case :)

Alt
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Re: Netgear X-RAID2 Recovery

Post by Alt » Mon Oct 15, 2012 7:44 am

The main problem here is the RAID parameters.

magicm
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Re: Netgear X-RAID2 Recovery

Post by magicm » Wed Oct 17, 2012 7:24 am

I finally finished up imaging all of the drives. Even though the admin provided what he thought were the correct parameters, R-Studio did not find a partition. I used ReclaiMe RAID Recovery software to scan the drive images to determine the parameters. The results were different than those provided by the admin so I'm hoping these new parameters are correct. The cool thing with ReclaiMe is the software provides you instructions for how to implement the parameters into R-Studio (as well as a few other recovery software). I'm going to try the recovery again using the new parameters from ReclaiMe this morning.

Manel, I'll let you know how it goes.

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