As promised, here’s a guide on how to recover data from your corrupted Terastation (TS Live, in my case) RAID-5 array using a Windows XP PC and UFS Explorer Pro.
First things first: don’t forget cooling. If you’re in a hurry, like me, you will pile the disks on the floor next to the PC. They will heat up like crazy there, so take necessary steps to cool them down. My solution was a €20 enclosed desktop fan, which blew room-temperature air towards the disks from a distance of 30 centimeters. Worked like a charm and kept the disks very cool.
What else you need? 1) a Windows XP PC with enough SATA ports on its motherboard. I needed six ports for the operation: one for the boot HDD, one for the 1TB backup HDD and four for Terastation’s disks. You can also bung the disks in external USB enclosures and hook the disks up to the PC via USB. I didn’t try that myself, but folks on NAS-Central forum claim it works. 2) UFS Explorer Professional. 3) Enough empty HDD space for the data you’re about to recover off the array.
I took great care and attached the disks in correct order to SATA ports. Ports 1 and 2 were taken by the boot HDD and the backup HDD, so I connected Terastation’s disk 1 to SATA port 3, disk 2 to port 4, disk 3 to port 5 and disk 4 to port 6. As a matter of fact, this is not absolutely mandatory: you only need to add partitions in the correct order to the Virtual RAID array (see Step 5).
Step by step (see image gallery text descriptions for further information):
- Step 1: Click Build virtual RAID array button.
- Step 2: Select RAID array on disk partitions.
- Step 3: Select RAID 5.
- Step 4: Select 64KB for Stripe size, and leave other parameters at default values.
- Step 5: Add correct partitions in the correct order. The partition you want is the largest Linux native (unclassified) partition on each disk; it’s inside the Extended partition with a tiny Linux swap partition. First add the partition from Terastation disk 1, then from disk 2 and so on.
- Step 6: Once all four partitions are added, click Build and your virtual RAID array appears in the list as SoftRAID.
- Step 7: Right click on Unknown partition and select File systems: fast detect in the pop-up menu.
If everything went correctly, the contents of your RAID array appear on the right. Congrats, all you need to do now is to copy the data to a secure location. Be aware that it’s not the fastest file operation on the planet; it took my PC ~20 hours to copy 1 terabyte of data off the array.
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