Recover data from Raid 1 drive
 

I was using a Buffalo LinkStation Duo to store pictures and the OS in the unit failed. As far as I know, the data on the two 1 TB drives is fine, and since Buffalo uses a Linux kernel in their LinkStation and the format is xfs, it should be possible to get the data off if I can mount one of the drives on a Linux box. I've put one of the drives into an external USB enclosure and attached it to my Linux system, but I cannot get the drive to mount, probably because it is one element of a Raid 1 array. Most of what I can find on the Web concerns setting up a new Raid array, not creating an array around a drive that already contains data. I have installed mdadm, and I'm running Mint Linux release 9 (Isadora) on an Intel box. When I run mdadm -D /dev/sdb or sdb6, the device and the partition where the data is located, it reports that the device does not appear to be an md device. I'm not sure what that means. Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I've got around 13,000 photos on these disks that have no backup (I figured what could go wrong with mirrored copies?).

Hi,

if the disk is really part of a software RAID the output of should show you a partition of type "Linux raid auto".

If such a partition exists you can try to reassemble the raid with the following command:
This provides the possibility to assemble a pre-existing raid also in case of problems.

After that try to mount your device
Hope this will help.

Pre-existing raid disk mounting solved
 

I'm not sure what did the trick, but the disk is now appearing properly as a managed raid device, and all the data is accessible. I tried a number of things I found on the Web in attempting to get it to mount, and this involved power cycling the computer so that I could safely remove the drive. I tried to get it running in "safe" mode in the old Buffalo box, but the box still crashed. After one of those attempts, I remounted it in the external USB enclosure, booted up Linux, and the array showed up as a Linus array. I then mounted it and all my data was available to be copied elsewhere.