All Drives Failed - Any Chance of Recovery?

Community Archives WD ShareSpace
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All four drives on my WD Sharespace have failed. I Googled some info but honestly dont even know what Linux is. Is there anything I can do to recover my data? I’m afraid I put too much trust in WD - I’m a writer and several years work in on those drives. I thought I was being smart backing my work and all my music up to this drive and now it’s dead. I have some local copies but the majority is on these failed drives.  I’m super worried and based on what I’ve read so far  I have a knot in my stomach while I wait for an answer…

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Hi,

We’re going to need a bit more information;

  • What model/ capacity have you got?
  • How are the drives formatted and arranged (RAIDx, Large Volume)?
  • What troubleshooting, if any, have you done?
  • Is the box powered up?
  • What’s the box doing, ie colour of the LEDs on the front;

Let us know…

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I have the 4TB WD Sharesapce (WD4000/A4NC-00). It has 4 drives in it and is (factory) configured as RAID5. At first I was getting drive failure on 4 - but before_ _I could go out and get something to back that drive up I came in and all 4 drives had failed.

All 4 drive lights are orange. That 5th light is green (i guess the networking one) and the 2 lights below that are not on. I was going to try to run RAID Recovery for Windows but it cant find the drive. I guess because it is only network connected - not USB. I have not idea waht to do (even witht hat software).

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Hi,

In the first instance you should log into the ShareSpaces administrator interface. You to this from the web browser.  I don’t have a ShareSpace any more so can’t tell you exactly how it’s done, but the documentation that came with it will.

Generally, if you know the IP address, for example 192.168.1.10,   for the ShareSpace typing http://192.168.1.10 into your web browser will get you there.

Assuming you can log in, click ADVANCED, then STORAGE. I’d expect that the drives will be marked as “degraded”. WD offers this guide on line.

Unfortunately there are a lot of post around the web indicating that there were (are?) major problems with recovering data from a degraded or corrupt array on a ShareSpace. Irrespective, it’s unlikely all of your drives have failed at once. I suspect just one might have which has made the Array unusable unless it is rebuilt.

Nevertheless, let us know if you can log in to the sharespace or not.

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I’m getting 4 steady amber lights, the thing is, these are new drives to upgrade the sharespace to 8tb, I think it’s unbelievable the sharespace itself has no means of formatting these drives to be used.

You’d think there’d be an ISO, EXE, or something that we can download which would allow these drives to be prepped and formatted for Sharespace usage.