How? Mount, Find & Recover DATA in HDD outside of Synology Box
How? Mount, Find & Recover DATA in HDD outside of Synology Box
I had originally posted this question here on Synology Forums and no real solution was suggested except a Linux / RAID based solution that worked for someone, but not for me.
I believe a LINUX & Drive/ Volume Expert could help with this as someone did use a similar solution to recover their RAIDed disk, but I was not using RAID, maybe JBOD/ SHR so I think there should be a way?
Many times I've run into issues of Synology or Hard Drive corruption/ error in sectors etc. where I have had to pretty much remove the Drive which Synology refuses to read or work with.
In such scenarios I am hoping I could use a bunch of Hard Drive recovery tools that I have after attaching the Disk to a PC/Box or Laptop via USB enclosure.
The question is, assuming I am able to detect the Hard Drive and assuming that hardware is still kind of functional, what way can I LOAD/ MOUNT the Drive (under Windows or Linux OS etc) on a PC/Laptop? (What tools/ software should I used to do that?)
I've used several Partition Management tools and I can see 4 partitions inside the Disk as created by Synology.
But, I cant seem to figure out a way to LOAD/ MOUNT the Data Volume where Synology stores my data.
Once that volume/partition is loaded (assuming there is some software/tool that can do that), how do I FIND where my DATA files and folders are stored, so that I can copy them off the Disk.
If it was a DIY Server using an OS & Partition type I had insights on it would be easy to figure out where the DATA is and attempt to recover it.
How can I do that for drives that get "messed up" inside the Synology Box?
One solutions path explored that did not work:
- No answer for you, I've got the exact same problem. I've tried various ext4 reading windows programs, all of which can see the drive & partitions, but none of which have been able to recover data (geeksnerds, stellar phoenix, linux reader, explore2fs, ext2explore, none of which allowed me to copy, recover or even see data files).
- Surprisingly, the drives do not auto mount in Ubuntu 12.04 either. Good luck.
Another Solution that worked well on RAIDed drive but I had no luck on my Disk (JBOD or SHR):
- Installed Ubuntu 11.10 (also tried with latest version 12.xx)into some spare SATA-drive. No updates needed to be installed. PC must have Internet connection.
- Attached drive from DS411 which was configured as RAID-1 mirror into Ubuntu PC and booted up.
- At "Dash Home" search 'disk utility' ans start it to see that attached drive exist and is visible in Linux.
- Install 'Logical Volume Management' software from "Ubuntu Software Center"
- Install 'mdadm'. At "Dash Home" search 'terminal' and start it. In terminal type: sudo apt-get install mdadm
- mdadm installation on first pop-up press 'tab' to get cursor on 'OK' and hit enter, for email configuration choose 'no configuration'
- After installation is complete type: sudo mdadm --assemble --scan After this command your attached Raid-1 mirror half should be visible on 'disk utility'-software.
- On disk utility, find selection on attached drive 'start volume group' after all volumes and array should be running, if not try to start volumes separately.
- Select volume where data is stored (biggest one) and below that click on 'mount'
- Open 'home folder' attached Raid-1 mirror half should be visible and data can be accessed and copied to other locations.
I've not had any luck using this method, but I can see the Disk attached and Ubuntu also gives me the option to format the drive. But, so far I am trying to see some way to recover the drive data.
This is how I resolved the same problem with an SHR-Raid on a Synology Diskstation. First, you have to work within the terminal. Second, you will need the mdadm package.
sudo apt-get install mdadm
then you have to check how the drive is registered in Ubuntu (/dev/sdc or something like that). The next command tells Linux that you want to run this drive as a volume
mdadm -A --verbose --run /dev/md3 /dev/sdc5
with that command, you force Linux to use this as volumegroup
mdadm -Sf /dev/md3
pvscan
gives back following information
File descriptor 4 (/dev/urandom) leaked on pvscan invocation. Parent PID 2451: bash
PV /dev/md3 VG vg1 lvm2 [1,81 TiB / 0 free]
Total: 1 [1,81 TiB] / in use: 1 [1,81 TiB] / in no VG: 0 [0 ]
with the next command, you make the volumegroup to a disk
vgchange -ay /dev/vg1
lvdisplay vg1
If you executed the steps correctly, you can find your drive in personal Folders under Ubuntu and you can mount the drive then. If you want, you can mount with terminal too:
mkdir /media/syno-vg1
mount /dev/vg1/lv -o ro /media/syno-vg1
Hope it works.
A bit late but of course we are using the Linux command line of the PC.
The drive is not in the DiskStation (that broke down) and this thread is about connecting the disk drive with all your movies to your PC and trying to rescue them to another hard disk.
The first solution (install LVM in the GUI and mdadm with apt-get) worked for me. After mdadm --assemble --scan I could access the partition in Disk Manager and mount it.
BTW. If you bought another DiskStation you can save all this trouble. There is a non-destructive way to install DSM on your hard disk, so afterwards you can use the new NAS as if it was the old one. Look on the Synology site.