Failed Hardware Mirror Disk- Want to convert one drive to non-mirrored
 

Hello and thank you to anyone that reads this.

History:
I own an Iomega NAS enclosure. It is basically a card with 2 sata drives attached and a network card that runs an small web interface.

To make a long story short. The controller card has went bad.
One drive dropped out of the mirrored set.... and then came back in and attempted to rebuild. Several hours later the drive dropped out again.
I attempted to replace the drive and the controller would not rebuild at all.

To summarize. I have accepted that the controller card is toast and want to proceed assuming one drive is compromised and the other still has salvageable data (About 18 GB needs recovered)


I took the presumed "good" drive.. attached it to a standalone enclousre that takes it from sata to USB.

When I look under disk manager (using Ubuntu 10) I see the following appear
1) the multi Disk device appears indicating it is part of a logical drive. Indented from that is
2) The "Array" Icon
3) The USB icon indicating a "peripheral device"
Indented from that is
4) the Drive as a 500 GB hard disk (correct)

when i click on 4) I see 2 volumes 1 1GB volume with partition type Linux (0x83) and a 499 GB partition with the same type (0x83)

However..because it thinks it is part of an array it is not mounting...

So... HOW do I tell this drive "you are not in an mirrored array anymore...mount as a single drive"

any advice is appreciated.. Again..thank you for your time.

Hi,
take this advice with caution! And take an imagebackup (ghost, clonezilla) of your drive(s) before you begin doing something with them

I am assuming that the nas device was using some sort of linux and using mdadm as raid manager.
If that was the case (and only then) you can try the following:

Connect both devices to your computer and run the following code after booting.
to find any array configured on the drive and try and assemble it.

would give you information on the state of the array.


As I said, please be very cautious with that if the data on the array is in any way important to you.

You could also try and take backup images with dd and try your magic on those, thus leaving the original discs untouched in case you would later like to let some specialized company try it.

Hi runatyr,

As per my knowledge every NAS device comes with a Management/User Interface (in my WD NAS it's a software shipped with NAS device and works while NAS device is connected through USB), from which I can reconfigure/rebuild the corrupted RAID Array.

So I would recommend following:
1. Make a mirror image of the good disk in your Raid array under NAS device, use dd or some other utility.
2. Get another working 500G disk and plug it under your NAS device while your working disk already plugged into the NAS enclousure, use Managment/User interface of you device and look for the options available for rebuilding RAID array, Please go through help/support section under Management interface to understand available options.

*Look at help/support section on iomega web portal for such issues and help.
**Share the model # of your NAS device then it will be helpful to look at iomega web portal and suggest you accordingly.

Thanks,