Mrmichaelhill Posted January 15, 2014 Posted January 15, 2014 Hello all! At a school I support we have had a Buffalo TeraStation fail. Exact model is TS-XE4.0TL/R5. It currently runs 4x 1TB drives in RAID5. When I first attended site I used an Ubuntu live CD and a drive dock to check the SMART status of each drive. On the day all the drives were fine except drive 3 was showing as 1 big unknown partition! I removed the third drive and rebooted the station, hoping it would attempt to rebuild the array but the station seemed to boot normal. Now this is the weird thing, the station will sometimes boot giving off loads of errors and sometimes fine. I have a suspicion that the firmware is corrupt on the station. I downloaded the latest firmware from Buffalo's website but the update software provided will not connect to the station, neither will trying to connect to it via its IP address in a web browser! Seems pretty corrupted to me! Now the main priority is data recovery, There is a lot of data on this that they wish to recover! I have the station with me and have ran a check again using Disk Utility on Ubuntu on my PC at home. This time it is showing the correct partitions on drive 3 and all disks healthy too! I've attached photos of the station booting up and its various messages and some from Disk Utility of each drive. On boot the station points out it is missing an init file on drives 1,2 & 3. (Missed taking the photograph on 2, only caught 1 & 3!) and shows the message HD Unkown? My question is what are the best ways to recover data? Disk utility (Ubuntu) gives me an option to Go To Array when I connect HD01. Will this rebuild the array and allow me to access the data? (Providing I connect ALL drives of course) does anyone know? Or are there any good recommended RAID recovery programs available? Surely as ALL the drives are readable and healthy there is a way? Any help is massively appreciated thanks! HD01... HD02... HD03... HD04... Booting up... https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2066107/sudleystation/BOOT1.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2066107/sudleystation/BOOT2.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2066107/sudleystation/BOOT3.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2066107/sudleystation/BOOT4.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2066107/sudleystation/BOOT5.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2066107/sudleystation/BOOT6.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2066107/sudleystation/BOOT7.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2066107/sudleystation/BOOT8.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2066107/sudleystation/BOOT9.jpg
SHimmer45 Posted January 17, 2014 Posted January 17, 2014 ive found with the buffalo products that firmware upgrades/restores work best from XP workstations. tries it on 7 and it failed all the time... any even if you manage to flash the firmware of the device if this is physically damaged its not going to behave as it should. if the buffalo is a "software" RAID then connecting the disks in the correct order in a linux system with mdam MAY allow you to read/rebuild the array. its a good sign that ubuntu is recognizing that the disk is part of an array so id start there.
Mrmichaelhill Posted January 17, 2014 Author Posted January 17, 2014 Brill, yeah I've tested each disk to check and all are showing up ok and all paritions readable! I think I'll connect them up to my machine later (ubuntu) and give it a whirl
SHimmer45 Posted January 17, 2014 Posted January 17, 2014 if you recover the data id be pushing for a backup solution for if the RAID fails on a device if they havent already got one. this is an in ideal opportunity to say its needed
Mrmichaelhill Posted January 19, 2014 Author Posted January 19, 2014 Connected and it seems to just mount a 5GB and 1GB partition, the 5GB appears to be the Buffalo linux data that must run in the station and the 1GB is the swap. It sees the other 4 drives as RAID 1 though and will not mount for some reason here... https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2066107/sudleystation/raid.png
Dataq Posted January 24, 2014 Posted January 24, 2014 Sometimes the Buffalo units will initialise a new RAID if all the disks are not accessible. If you're not going down the route of seeking a recovery service then the first thing you should do is clone all the disks and work from the clones. Safety first!
saundersmatt Posted January 24, 2014 Posted January 24, 2014 Give the Buffalo tech support a ring. They were helpful when I was struggling to rebuild an array in a terastation. Matt
Dataq Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 Could be a bit risky following the Buffalo tech support on the actual disks. I wouldn't even suggest trying a firmware update if there is data you need. Those RAID 1 partitions are across all the disks and contain the Buffalo software that runs the NAS. If you choose the Edit components button on the RAID 5, you should see how many of the disks are listed or missing. Don't change anything in there though! Making clones is still the safest way forward, and you may find one or two of the disks have issues during the clone.
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