Common enough story: 4 x 1 TB Raid 5 failed after update. Datavolume missing. As it turned out, I had a faulty drive too.
To recover the whole array, I used a registered copy of R-Studio . Disks in REVERSE ORDER, 4th partition in each disk, Create Virtual Block Raid. Settings as below.
Start the scan and and the 3 TB partition appeared in green. Double-click that and the whole data structure was there. Mark what I wanted and pressed Recover. 10 minutes, no Linux command lines.
You need a Windows PC with R-studio installed - start with the free trial and pay for it once you know it will work
You need to remove all 4 drives from the sharespace and connect them to the PC, either USB, SATA or a combination.
Make sure you know which drive is which when you connect them. Then start R-studio, read the help about Virtual Block Raid, and follow the settings in the first post.
Once you have the drives connected, and R-Studio set up correctly, scan the Virtual Raid, and it will find your 6TB partition.
There are plenty of threads here, and in the archives, with excellent explanations of the Linux recovery method if you can’t buy R-Studio.
I definitely did not find R Studio was enough to recover files on my corrupt Raid 5. I am suspicious that all but the smallest files will be “corrupt”.
My 4TB Sharespace NAS (like most on the market I think) utilizes a Linux OS with an additional layer of abstraction called LVM. This LVM allows all kinds of merging and drive bridging but overlays its own directory structure which is completely unintelligible to R Studio. I found that R-Studio will find file stems but inserted LVM metadata will make most recovered files useless.
Maybe a simpler solution would work in your situations. Spend time educating yourself. Try the easy steps but only if their initial description is exactly the same as yours and only to the point that you realize your result really is not the same as the authors. The moment you sense you are in the weeds: STOP. If working on your original data you can make it irretrievable!
Recoverying data with a second computer really does work. It was worth the effort for me for my family photos and financials. Hope this helps.
I had the same problem with my sharespace. I now have a registred copy of R-Studio and the proper hardware to acces the drives but I do not fully understand how to set my virtual drive. Can you help ?
There looks to be something unusual about that #4 USB disk, so if you have problems, maybe remove it from the virtualRAID, and “add missing disk” in its place.
In the left panel, select the newly created VirtualBlockRaid1 and SCAN.
In the list of partitions found there should be a green 3TB. If there isn’t, try recreating the virtualRAID in reverse order, or without the strange USB#4 disk.
Once you have the 3TB partition found, you can proceed to recover the data
