Hard drive issues
Discussion
Hi folks,
I have an old NAS RAID drive which I've used for years with my macs. It stopped booting up so I pulled a drive out and connected it with a USB to SATA adaptor cable set thingy. It doesn't show up as a drive on the desktop when connected and if i go to Disk Utility it says it's Uninitialised and the partition map is unsupported. I just want to be able to access the data but am worried that I'll wipe it if I click the wrong option!
If anyone has any ideas I'd be very grateful. TIA.
I have an old NAS RAID drive which I've used for years with my macs. It stopped booting up so I pulled a drive out and connected it with a USB to SATA adaptor cable set thingy. It doesn't show up as a drive on the desktop when connected and if i go to Disk Utility it says it's Uninitialised and the partition map is unsupported. I just want to be able to access the data but am worried that I'll wipe it if I click the wrong option!
If anyone has any ideas I'd be very grateful. TIA.
So just to get this straight: you had a NAS, which had several drives that were formatted as a RAID array?
You've now pulled one of these drives out and connected it directly through a SATA-to-USB connector?
Yeah. That's not going to work, ever. Your drive is formatted for a RAID array, and won't be accessible directly by your computer. It can only be read as part of the original RAID. Presuming that the NAS has been powered off the whole time, if you put the drive back into the same place in the NAS then you might be able to recover something. If the NAS has been powered on at all then you've almost certainly lost the whole lot.
You've now pulled one of these drives out and connected it directly through a SATA-to-USB connector?
Yeah. That's not going to work, ever. Your drive is formatted for a RAID array, and won't be accessible directly by your computer. It can only be read as part of the original RAID. Presuming that the NAS has been powered off the whole time, if you put the drive back into the same place in the NAS then you might be able to recover something. If the NAS has been powered on at all then you've almost certainly lost the whole lot.
What make of NAS, and what type of raid did you use? It's unlikely you will pull or see any data just connecting the drive via cable.
When you say it won't boot, what messages are you seeing/hearing?
Depending on the type of NAS you have, you could purchase a secondhand identical NAS from ebay, default it, then move the disks over to that.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/t...
When you say it won't boot, what messages are you seeing/hearing?
Depending on the type of NAS you have, you could purchase a secondhand identical NAS from ebay, default it, then move the disks over to that.
https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/DSM/t...
It's a Western Digital MyBookWorld 2.0 TB. I'm in over my head with this level of tech! A secondhand one sounds sensible.
The startup procedure for this NAS drive is to switch power on and wait for it to wake up and get ready (the lights on the front change when it's ready) then press power again (iirc) to properly switch it on. When I tried switching it on recently the light on the front just stayed at the bottom position and it doesn't do anything - it just hangs. Doesn't show up on desktop, doesn't sound like it's spinning the disks.
User manual states the indicator light is stuck in the powering up phase.
The startup procedure for this NAS drive is to switch power on and wait for it to wake up and get ready (the lights on the front change when it's ready) then press power again (iirc) to properly switch it on. When I tried switching it on recently the light on the front just stayed at the bottom position and it doesn't do anything - it just hangs. Doesn't show up on desktop, doesn't sound like it's spinning the disks.
User manual states the indicator light is stuck in the powering up phase.
Edited by bramley on Wednesday 9th December 16:55
Edited by bramley on Wednesday 9th December 17:06
Just to be really clear .... how was the RAID set up?
- Simple mirroring (RAID 1) - all the data is on both disks, if you can find something that can read the file system, each disk will have all the data.
- Striping (RAID 0) - the data is smeared over both disks. You need both disks running to get any data.
- Redundant striping - (RAID 5) - you can lose one disk and recover from the rest of them.
Now - the problem I have with this is that the device only seems to have one disk in it according to a quick google. So you haven’t got RAID, you’ve got a disk in a box that exposes a NAS interface. At a guess, this will be formatted with a Linux file system (say EXT4) that your windows machine can’t read. If you try and read it with the Windows machine, you are likely to trash it.
So:
Step 1 is to work out if it is the disk or the device. If you take the disk out, does it boot? It may be hanging up because the disk is dead, or the device is dead. If it gets further in the boot process without the disk (e.g. more lights or beeps) it is likely to be the disk, so buying a s/h device is unlikely to work.
Step 2 - if taking the disk out results in no change, then get an s/h one, and try it.
Step 3 - and you might go straight to this is the data on it is important - go to a professional recovery service and get it read. It is likely to cost a few hundred quid. I guess that if you plug the disk into a Linux box, and it is working, then it would be readable, but it isn’t my data .... you can get read only Linux file system drivers for Windows if you’re desperate. As a rule, never enable read/write on these.
- Simple mirroring (RAID 1) - all the data is on both disks, if you can find something that can read the file system, each disk will have all the data.
- Striping (RAID 0) - the data is smeared over both disks. You need both disks running to get any data.
- Redundant striping - (RAID 5) - you can lose one disk and recover from the rest of them.
Now - the problem I have with this is that the device only seems to have one disk in it according to a quick google. So you haven’t got RAID, you’ve got a disk in a box that exposes a NAS interface. At a guess, this will be formatted with a Linux file system (say EXT4) that your windows machine can’t read. If you try and read it with the Windows machine, you are likely to trash it.
So:
Step 1 is to work out if it is the disk or the device. If you take the disk out, does it boot? It may be hanging up because the disk is dead, or the device is dead. If it gets further in the boot process without the disk (e.g. more lights or beeps) it is likely to be the disk, so buying a s/h device is unlikely to work.
Step 2 - if taking the disk out results in no change, then get an s/h one, and try it.
Step 3 - and you might go straight to this is the data on it is important - go to a professional recovery service and get it read. It is likely to cost a few hundred quid. I guess that if you plug the disk into a Linux box, and it is working, then it would be readable, but it isn’t my data .... you can get read only Linux file system drivers for Windows if you’re desperate. As a rule, never enable read/write on these.
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