saitti.org

I’ve got a bunch of Buffalo Terastations, ranging from the first generation slow-as-molasses boxes to the latest gen Lives. I’ve configured each and every one of them as RAID-5 array for added data security. Recent events have taught me a lot about Terastations, RAID arrays and the necessity of backups.

First thing you need to realize is that I’m mad about music. It’s my life; I couldn’t live without music. I’m not exaggarating when I say there’s music playing in my house 18 hours a day. I’ve got most of my 3000+ CD collection encoded into mp3 files, in addition to which I’ve got plenty of music hoarded from other sources (*cough*). I have — well, had — my entire mp3 collection on one Terastation Live. And only there. No backups. None what-so-ever. Yes, I know: I am an idiot.

So, wouldn’t you just know it — that particular Terastation dies on me. I happened to walk past it and noticed its LCD screen reading

System
Now Booting…..

Eh, what? Booting, while my Squeezebox was happily playing tunes from it? How peculiar. I decided to reboot the box, so I stopped Squeezebox and pressed the on/off button on Live. The box gave a tiny *beep* as it was supposed to… but it wouldn’t shut down. I pressed the button again. *Beep!* Nothing happened. Button: *Beep!* Button: *Beep!* Zilch, nada, zip.

As my last recourse I kept the button pressed down long enough to force a shutdown. This Live has a history of acting up; it’s gone into EM mode (Engineer/Emergency mode) on its own once; it’s disappeard from LAN a few times; and once I had to do a forced firmware upgrade to solve an E04 error. I’m quite sure this unit’s a lemon and has to go back.

Anyways, I restarted the box. After a while its display again read

System
Now Booting…..

There’s nothing odd about that — except usually that text only flashes by quickly at the end of the boot process. This time it stayed on. For 9 hours. And it wouldn’t finish “booting up”. I couldn’t access the box over LAN with anything, not even with Buffalo’s own discovery applications.

I decided to force the box into EM mode. On/off button insisted on playing silly buggers again, so I forced a shutdown. Keeping down the INIT button I powered the box up. This time the box got stuck with the display reading

System EM Mode
Now Booting…..

I left the box at it for a few hours, but it never finished booting or appeared in LAN. It was around here when I started getting very worried about losing my entire music collection.

Lesson #1: a RAID-5 array is not its own back-up.

Google knows everything, right? Well, not in this case. Using a wide variety of keywords and search terms, I could locate only one person who’d had the exact same problem with his Terastation. In his case, Buffalo had offered to rescue his data in exchange for money. Buffalo’s own website makes no bones about the whole thing: it’s your responsibility alone, and Buffalo can’t be held responsible for any data lost due to malfunctioning hardware.

I reported my problem to Buffalo tech support, but it’s quite clear I shouldn’t hold my breath waiting for them to solve this thing for me.

After a bit of cooling down (i.e. a stiff drink) I opened Live’s front door to gain access to the HDDs. On Live, they are mercifully easy to eject so I took each one out and checked all cables were properly attached by jiggling them around and pressing the connectors down hard. Closed the door and powered the box up.

Several minutes passed with HDD leds blinking furiously. A properly functioning Live boots up in less than a minute. I was preparing myself for another endless boot, when suddenly Live let out a shrill scream. Display read “System E04 Error Cannot Load Kernel”.

E04, now that’s something I’m familiar with. It can be fixed by forcing a firmware update, and I’ve done that once on this box already. That time there was a difference, though: back then I was able access the box over LAN. One can’t do a fimware upgrade if Live refuses to talk over Ethernet — and this one kept schtumm with a resolve that would impress the hell out of any Guantanamo Bay interview technician.

Lesson #2: Community knows best.

Further googling lead me to Buffalo NAS-Central which has loads of useful information and articles. Of particular interest to me were articles such as ‘Revive your arm9 box from scratch‘ and ‘Terastation Data Recovery‘.

I tried the TFTP solution first, but Terastation wouldn’t even try to load Kernal or ramdisc from my laptop PC. Reading the forums it became clear that the first partition on my HDDs had been corrupted. Thus Live was unable to load kernel and initrd, and wouldn’t boot up.

It was time to accept reality of the situation and delve into manual data recovery. NAS-Central’s article about Terastation Data Recovery looks pretty daunting at first; it talks about PPC Apple Mac and Ubuntu Linux, but scroll down further and you’ll hit a section called Data Recovery on x86 (Windows) using UFS Explorer.

Lesson #3: Money takes second place after your precious data.

I purchased the UFS Explorer Professional Recovery Edition for 44 euros, installed it, connected HDDs from Live to PC and followed NAS-Central’s instructions.

It’s working. There’s a PC in my living room that’s currently rescuing data from Live’s HDDs to a 1TB HDD I purchased for this occasion. It’s going to take a while, though, as reads are quite slow; around 5-7MB/sec. But I don’t care how long it takes, as long as I get my files back!

The instructions for this operation are a bit too vague on NAS-Central, and I had to make a couple of guesses which turned out OK, luckily. Once I’ve got my data safely on another HDD, I think I’ll make a proper guide on how to use UFS Explorer for Terastation Data Recovery. Look for it later this week.