NASLite Network Attached Storage

Wow, it's been a while since I have posted, and Naslite-M2 has been an excellent product. I recently had 4 hard drives begin to fail or fail. They won't mount.

I am hoping someone will have a recommendation for me.

I have tried correcting the hard drives using the NL menu, but it's been a no go

I have also tried using Elementary OS & Knoppix to do an fsck but no go, as there are too many errors that seem to keep fsck in a loop. The hard drives are quite noisy and won't mount even after a full day of fsck.

One of the common error messages I get is 'Inode for group 526 is not in group. (527)'

I have attempted to rebuild using a different block group, but no go as well

The Hard Drives that are failing or have failed are:

1) WD - 120 GB EIDE
2) WD - 500 GB EIDE
3) WD - 500 GB EIDE
4) WD - 1 TB Green SATA

The only solution I have not yet tried is using a linux program called 'gddrescue' which creates a disc image as best it can.

Prior to that, is there anything else I can try to recover the files or get the disks up and running to transfer?

Thank you, and I really appreciate the help.

I should also add, that I have used gparted to check and fix the drive(s) but they just seem to be stuck in the loop with regards to that 526 group error message as previously stated.

Sounds like you have tried all the standard stuff and may find some exotic software package to recover the data but from the sound of it I kinda doubt it. When drives are really noisy and you have a boat load of failed sectors there is little you can do.

You see the issue is that the age of the drive/s is such that they are very likely to have a hardware failure at this point. I have drives that ran for over ten years solid. I only spun them down a hand full of times and every time I did to service the box and spun them back up after they were noisier than before to say the least. They would quiet up after they heated up and stabilized but it was a crap shoot. I had the data backed up to another set of drives but I did retire them about a year ago.

The issues are exacerbated further if you turn off the NAS every day with the thermal cycling and the head parking. If you didn't backup that data you had on them then the only real option you have is a data recovery company or to let it go and learn a lesson. Get ready to fork out money though if you go the data recovery route, they ain't cheap!

Remember, storage=cheap. Data recovery=ass rape!

Hi mikeiver1,

Thank you for your reply.

I have some great news! Using Elementary OS (Linux OS built on ubuntu that I have as a VM on my Macbook), I was able to recover the data off of the first 120 GB hard using GNU ddrescue a.k.a. ddrescue!

It took a little while with some quick google searches, and some studying on the commands, but I was able to run ddrescue, and clone the failed hard drive. I then ran 'testdisk' which analyzed the MBR of the cloned hard drive and told me to run 'fsck' (file system consistency check, for the n00bs like me) using a different boot record to start from.

I had to manually run 'fsck' and answer 'y' (yes) to all the errors, as it gave me an error stating it required to be run manually when i tried to force / automate it to answer yes. So for about 10 minutes I sat there physically pressing the 'y' key and then the cloned drive mounted and voila, all of my cloned/backup files were readable!

I thought I would share my experience and report back with the great news