Data Recovery NAS 200 Raid 0

[Del]

HELP. I had a NAS 200 connected to my router via RJ45 to store pictures on from 4 networked computers. All computers are running Vista Home Premium. The NAS has two 320G Seagate SATA hard drives.

A representative from a RAID recovery software company said his software would not work as Linksys uses proprietary formatting. The tech at Linksys accessed my computer to try to fix the NAS200 and when he was done, My public folder and the pictures that were in it are no longer viewable.

Amazing, the case number the tech gave me, bogus.

At any rate, is there any way that I can connect the two drives to my PC via SATA and recover any files? I connected the drives and Disk Management sees them with partitions, but under my computer, none of the drives show up.

 

[zx10guy]

I really hope you mean RAID 1 and not RAID 0.

This is a classic example of why you MUST have a backup system in place because as many times as it has been stated....RAID is not a backup system. I have the data volumes on my file servers on RAID 5. Data I really want to protect is further copied to an external hard drive.

Which data recovery company did you talk to? Was it Ontrack?

 

[Del]

RAID 0.. Guess that is why I'm here. Tried RAID Reconstructor v4.00 from runtiime.org. Yup, my bad.

Guess I'm lucky, I had a backup from 1998 thru Aug 2009. But lots of birthday pictures and vid clips may be lost.

Any positive thoughts??

 

[JohnWill]

Truthfully? No. If you have RAID-0 and either volume has been compromised, the data is most likely gone.

 

[Del]

I know how stupid that was. I did tech support for 8 years for ISP's and Microsoft and told many customers the same thing. I guess people just get lazy and comfortable and don't do what they should but I think the NAS 200 was the problem and not the drives. IF so, does anyone have an idea of how I can try to read the drives and get the data?

Below are screen shots of my computer and disk management when I connected the two SATA drives to my box.

 

[TerryNet]

One reason Windows recognizes a partition but gives it no drive letter is because it does not have one of the few formats that Microsoft recognizes. I'd try booting to a Linux Live CD to see if Linux likes the drives better. Puppy Linux (only ~100 MB download) or Ubuntu would be my choices.

 

[Del]

I went thru the setup wizard for the NAS and the way the options were presented, I think I may have chosen RAID 1. Also, I remember thinking I only had 320G even though I had two 320G drives. Would that make a difference?

I hate to admit this, it makes me look a bit less stupid for the selection, but pretty dumb for not remembering which I selected before..

 

[zx10guy]

So. Having the array set up as a RAID 1 is better, but here's the problem. Without knowing the true nature of this failure, one can assume some sort of corruption could have happened be it the file table or what have you. If the failure was not physical in nature, the corrupted data gets copied over to the other drive in the RAID 1 set like it is valid data. Remember, RAID operates at the block storage level which means the topology is file system agnostic. At the controller level, bits are bits no matter if they are corrupted. Again, this is why a proper backup solution/system needs to be used in conjunction with any RAID system. But if the system was set up as a RAID 1, you can try pulling one of the drives to see if you can see the data.

Now, there could be ways to retrieve the data outside of just using data recovery software. There are data recovery companies which have spare parts of all hard drives in existence (at least most of them) where they can swap out your platters and install them in a working system under clean room conditions. There are also companies which can also go down into the microscopic level to look at how the magnetic media is oriented to determine bit state and resurrect data that way via a SEM. But going these routes will cost $$$$$$.

 

[Del]

I think the NAS 200 itself is the problem and I believe the drives are ok. Linksys did trouble shooting and determined that it was the NAS. It would cost almost 30% of what I paid to ship the unit back for replacement.

I was hoping there was a way to connect it to my Vista box and recover the data. While the family pictures mean alot to me and THE WIFE, it is not something I would want to mortage my house to recover.

Thanks

 

[JohnWill]

Well, I'd ship it back for replacement and stick the drives back into the replacement. There is a VERY SMALL if at all chance that you can recover data from any sort of RAID configuration on another dissimilar box.