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Author Topic: Format the NAS?  (Read 2760 times)

DiabloHitto

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Format the NAS?
« on: August 05, 2015, 05:57:50 PM »

Hey, 

I have a DNS-343 that has x4  2TB hard drives in RAID 5 with firmware 1.04.  The web console told me hard drive 4 failed the quick a month ago.  I also noticed a few weeks ago, of how long it took to access the NAS, and even would come up with errors like NAS is unavailable from PC.  So I turned off NAS,  replaced hard drive 4.  I logged into the web console, and it said initializing..   Then it came up with an option stating that it needs to format the newly inserted hard drive.  It gave me several raid options to choose from.  I chose Raid 5 since that is what this is set up in, and continued with the process (EXT3) and then it told me that it was formatting my root directory..  !!!  So I stopped the process immediately.   Could no longer access the files.  Put old hard drive back in,  gives me the same message about a newly inserted hard drive.  I am pretty sure all 4.5 TB is lost.   So where did I go wrong in the process?  Should I have formatted the new hard drive on my windows computer before replacing the bad hard drive in the NAS?   Ofc,  I have a physical copy of 3.5TB\4.5TB, but geez man!..
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JavaLawyer

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Re: Format the NAS?
« Reply #1 on: August 06, 2015, 07:41:27 AM »

There is a procedure you can use to recover the data presuming the RAID array is still in tact:
DNS-343 Data Recovery

It's also important to point out that RAID is NOT a backup.  RAID only provides redundancy to improve up-time, but contributes nothing in terms of backup.  Using a RAID-5 w/out a backup is like working without a safety net.  My recommended approach is using standard volumes and scheduling backups between the two to keep everything in sync.  That uses more HDD space, but is more secure.

Regarding your issue...

The DNS-343 formats HDDs using the Linux filesystem, so you must let the DNS-343 format the HDD.  I'm not sure where things went wrong.  I never had a RAID-5 fail on my DNS-343s, but was under the impression that the option would be to "Rebuild", not "format" -- I'm not 100% sure.

Do you have a backup?  If not, please let me know how your data recovery efforts go. 
I would also consider moving to FW v1.05
« Last Edit: August 06, 2015, 07:44:16 AM by JavaLawyer »
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