Recovering a ShareSpace that had its RAID5 rebuilt

WD Legacy Products Other Network Drives
1

I have a 4x1Tb ShareSpace configured as a RAID5 (default settings) and with the latest firmware. I accidentally clicked in the rebuilt RAID button of the web interface and once the process was complete I lost all contents of the RAID.

I have a few questions and am hoping someone can help me decide what to do. Since I did not change any settings of the RAID I assume the data is still there and recoverable (hopefully a valid assumption!).

First, is it possible to recover the data using the ShareSpace enclosure and onboard software? That is, without removing the disks out to insert them on a computer? If so, how could I do that?

Second, if I need to remove the disks, does anyone have recommendations on how to recover the data? Would R-Studio do the job in this particular case?

In the case of a rebuilt RAID, something I have not seen on the message boards, is there anything I need to watch for when attempting to recovering the data?

Thanks in advance! I would really like to have the family picture back…

2

Hello,

We are sorry to hear that. Currently, when you rebuilt the RAID, the information on the drives will be completely erase.

You might need to contact a data recovery company.

Check the link below for a list of data recovery that have experience working with WD Drives.

http://support.wdc.com/recovery/index.asp?lang=en

3

Thanks for the response. Following up on your response, specifically, does rebuilding the RAID writes zeroes over the contents of all the drives? What steps does rebuilding the RAID process go through?

4

Hi

Yes,  Rebuilding the RAID will format the drives to configure then for the specific task.

5

Following up on my post hoping that the additional information will allow someone to guide me to the final steps in the recovery process…

I decided to get R-Studio and it helped a lot. I was able to determine that rebuilding the RAID does not erase the entire disk - the files are still there. I was able to see many pictures, but unfortuinately found that most are corrupted (but the thumbnails look fine), and other files are similar in that they cannot be fully recovered.

  

Using R-Studio I was able to see that the RAID5 is Left Symmetrical (Synchronous) with a 64kb sector size.

I looked for LVM configuration files, but there were no backup or archive copies of the under /etc/lvm. What I found was in log and other files under /tmp. This is what I was able to reconstruct (same information in each of the 4 disks):

Generated by LVM2: Sat Sep  3 17:07:52 2011

contents = “Text Format Volume Group”

version = 1

description = “Created *after* executing ‘vgcreate lvmr1 /dev/md2’”

creation host = “NET-STORAGE”  # Linux NET-STORAGE 2.6.12.6-arm1 #47 Mon Aug 16 16:23:50 CST 2010 armv5tejl

creation_time = 1315084072 # Sat Sep  3 17:07:52 2011

lvmr1 {

 id = “48wmss-e1jf-4eO7-cArw-2Zq4-j0rx-7R4gFw”

 seqno = 1

 status = [“RESIZEABLE”, “READ”, “WRITE”]

 extent_size = 8192 # 4 Megabytes

 max_lv = 255

 max_pv = 255

 physical_volumes {

  pv0 {

    id = “wFYyFp-7QVw-3GR2-OI2U-BCVx-IpPa-XL4CZj”

   device = “/dev/md2” # Hintonly

   status = [“ALLOCATABLE”]

   pe_start = 384

   pe_count = 714218 # 2.72453 Terabytes

   }

 }

}

It seems to be missing the logical volume info, but I am not an expert. I am wondering what I need to do next to recover the files (the pictures and tax files are the most important) and whether the folder hierarchy is recoverable.

Any hints or advices would be very much appreciated.

Thanks.