RAID 5 Volume deleted and the re-added

Wolverine

New member
Hi,
So I have been trying lots of ways to try and recover my RAID 5. I have a synology DS414 NAS and it has 4 x 2Tb drives in it. About 2 weeks ago one of the drives crashed. All the stores were closed so I waited until the next day and went and got another drive. During this time a 2nd drive failed to initiate. I was like no problem I have a full backup I will just delete the volume and re-enable it and then load the backup on.
I made a rookie error and never checked the backup which was corrupt and not even viewable.
So I have since been able to get the drive that initially crashed back working. I have plugged the 4 drives into my PC and have tried various software to try and recover the files but it seems that I only ever get a 1/4 picture or grey picture or nothing on pdf or avi files not viewable.
Is there anything I can do or can someone please help as I can't afford the $550 per drive to recover the files professionally or is this my only option.
Any help at all would be amazing.
 

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
Well, first off, I'd just mention that our pricing here at Data Medics is only $325/drive, so much cheaper than wherever you were quoted. Pro recovery is definitely your best bet at getting a good result. One more rookie mistake and it's likely to be game over for the data for good.

If you are insistent on DIY recovery, the first thing you'd need to do is get a full sector by sector clone of each drive. I'd recommend you use either ddrescue or HDDSuperClone for this (both run in Linux only). You can read my ddrescue tutorial here: how-to-clone-a-hard-drive-with-bad-sectors-using-ddrescue-t133.html . At the very least one or more of the drives has bad sectors to have kicked offline. These two programs are the only non-hardware tools that have the capability to handle some bad sectors. If the drives are in worse shape than just bad sectors, then you'll definitely need pro recovery.

Only after getting a full clone of each and every disk should you begin your work in trying to recover the data logically. Since the RAID was recreated, the mdadm RAID metadata was overwritten on the disks. So now, the RAID parameters and logical volume will need to be manually recreated. It can all be done in R-Studio, UFSExplorer or Recovery Explorer, but it's not likely to be any sort of automatic detection case. It'll definitely need some manual figuring out.

If you do successfully get them all cloned onto good disks, perhaps one of us could do the recovery remotely for you at a discounted rate. You'd just have to invest in some $80 software and the necessary disks to clone the data to.
 
Top