HELP! How to salvage data from a failed RAID1 setup (Hammer MyShare)

[mindbender9]

Hello all,

Situation:
I purchased a 1 TB Hammer MyShare NAS *almost* a year ago and for some reason, the unit refuses to power on as of last night. The LED on the power adaptor brick is flashing on/off when I plug it into the NAS but is strangely solid green when it is removed.

Anyhow, I contacted Hammer's Tech Support and the tech is going to send a replacement cord out today for me to try. The problem is that I don't think that a new cord will fix things and the unit itself is bad.

My problem is that if I send it back for warranty coverage, Hammer's tech support will only send me a new unit and I lose all my data. The tech support rep said that my only other choice is to break the warranty seal and pull the drives out and have someone extract the data. Although $500 would go down the drain, I would still be able to keep all of my files (which is probably what I'm going to do).

Specifics:
Long story short, I had the NAS set up in a RAID1 configuration where data is mirrored on both drives. I've heard that you cannot simply plug a mirrored drive in and copy the data off to your PC. I'm afraid that there is a way to salvage the data with some specialized software but I don't know what to do.

Can someone help with this? The Hammer tech support cannot advise me how to do this (because it voids the warranty), and all they could say is that I have to take it to "someone who knows how to do this."

Help!
Please help! Oh, and I would avoid the Hammer product line if a NAS manufacturer cannot assist a customer in salvaging data on one of their units.

Thank you for your help!

Buy another of the same model, put your drives into that unit and salvage your data.

Then return the unit.

And remember that RAID is not a backup solution.

[mindbender9]

Can't remove the drives without breaking the warranty seal. So the manufacturer would know right away if I removed any drives.

Thanks though.

[scotty]

Try to get your hands on another unit. A lot of manufacturer's these days will send you a replacement before sending the old one back, so that might work for you. Call the Manufacturer's warranty department and explain your problem. Speak to a supervisor if you have to. That's an obvious problem that isn't going to be solved until your drives come out.

[mindbender9]

Their tech support was pretty insistent that opening the chassis would violate their terms of agreement regarding the warranty. I've read on some threads that BellMicro/Hammer will not honor any of their units which have been opened.

Which is crazy, because what NAS manufacturer prevents their users from accessing the drives? Don't buy any of their products if you can avoid them.

Thanks again for your help.

[jdabbs]

Thanks for the warning; sorry you had to find out the hard way.

[justin2net]

try runtime's raid reconstructor; i've heard good things about it. then i would try to get my hands on a replacement "chassis" to put your old drives in.

best of luck!

[mindbender9]

I'll look into Raid Reconstructor, and I appreciate your help.

I have a dumb question for everyone: Has anyone actually tried to unplug one of two RAID 1 hard drives and connect it directly to a PC? Does anyone know whether or not the contents of the drive are viewable?

Thanks.

[Grab485]

Originally Posted by mindbender9

I'll look into Raid Reconstructor, and I appreciate your help.

I have a dumb question for everyone: Has anyone actually tried to unplug one of two RAID 1 hard drives and connect it directly to a PC? Does anyone know whether or not the contents of the drive are viewable?

Thanks.

I had such experience.
I have software RAID 1 on Ubuntu Linux (using mdadm).
When I disconnected one drive, it was impossible to mount the other one - the system reported "disk is already mounted" and, of course, there were no mounted disk.

BUT.... when I started Ubuntu LiveCD (without mdadm), it was very easy to mount one of RAID's disk - just mount bla-bla, and I can see it. I mean as a separate disk I can read and write.

Conclusion: there is something on your system what prevents only one RAID 1 disk mounting. But one can easily do it from another system or LiveCD.

[thiggins]

Originally Posted by mindbender9

I have a dumb question for everyone: Has anyone actually tried to unplug one of two RAID 1 hard drives and connect it directly to a PC? Does anyone know whether or not the contents of the drive are viewable?

It depends on whether the manufacturer made any modifications to a standard filesystem. Your computer also must support the drive format.

For example, Linux-based systems tend to use ext2 or ext3 (which Windows doesn't natively support). But QNAP uses a modified version of ext3 in their NASes that prevent drives from being mounted in Linux systems.