We have a NAS device (Acer Altos Easystore) with a RAID 5 array that is not working properly anymore. The NAS device turns on and all the lights go green, but when i access the web interface it will only show the following message :

THE STORAGE SYSTEM IS CURRENTLY BOOTING...

This message stays forever.

We did a factory reset but that didn't work unfortunately. Same message. The worst part is, we cannot access our data which is very important for us. The device has about 1,5 TB of valuable information.

Before this problem occured i received some error reports
by E-mail sent by the device some days before saying that Disk1 had failed and that the array is working in degraded mode.

Every time we received that error message we checked the NAS device and it rebuilded itself again.

The device has 4 750 GiB disks in RAID 5.

Actions:
I took out the 4 disks and placed them in another PC and started a Knoppix LIVE CD (latest version)

installed MDADM and it showed a working "clean" RAID 5 array, it created /dev/md0.

I tried to mount /dev/md0 but it gave me some error like "Unknown filesystem". A support tecnician from Acer told me that the filesystem is XFS.

So i tried : mount -t xfs /dev/md0 /mnt/xfsdev

Didn't work either. I can't remember the exact error. But it looked like the XFS file system is damaged.

Someone advised me to setup a Local loopback device (i have no idea why)

root ~ # hexdump -C /dev/sda1 | head -n 2000 | grep XFSB
root ~ # hexdump -C /dev/sda2 | head -n 2000 | grep XFSB
00307e00 58 46 53 42 00 00 10 00 00 00 00 00 0a e7 93 00 |XFSB............|

I first had to find the offset with HEXDUMP and afterwards setup the local loopback device with the following command

# losetup /dev/loop0 /dev/sda2 -o 3177984

I tried to mount it :
mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/xfsdev -o loop,ro

ERROR : Filesystem needs structuring

So i downloaded XFSProgs, and did a XFS_check, the check advised me to run XFS_repair to rectify some errors.

So i did : xfs_repair /dev/loop0

And its starts repairing.... saying PRIMARY SUPERBLOCK not found, looking for secondary SUPERBLOCK, CANDIDATE FOUND etc.
and after some minutes. The system hangs!

I tried different versions of XFS_Repair, but it keeps on hanging on the first step?

Does anyone has an idea why? Is it because im doing it from a live CD? I only have 756 MiB of RAM, is that too little for XFS_REPAIR?

Perhaps someone has another idea about recovering the data?

http://marc.info/?l=linux-xfs&m=120600321509730&w=2
http://old.nabble.com/A-rescue-tool:...d21209013.html
xfs_irecover may now be in xfsprogs

An example of a rescue of an xfs raid5 array:
http://oss.sgi.com/pipermail/xfs/200...er/010088.html

The puzzle is that you report a complete failure - which is usuasual. Normally you need only replace the errant drive and let the raid rebuild.

Hi Simon,

Thanks very much for your reply. It seems xfs_irecover is not available yet. At least not with XFS progs.

Something happened in the meanwhile :

In my current machine i installed an extra IDE HDD and installed ubuntu 9.10 on it. When ubuntu loads up it automatically finds my RAID 5 and says its CLEAN, i can even mount the filesystem.

On the filesystem there are 2 folders which i cant acess, i get a access denied! its the "Lost+Found" folder and the "NAS" folder. My data is in the NAS folder.

I have very little experience in Linux, is there any method / command i can use to access these folder?

Thank you very much in advance

This has happened to me before - I struggle for a month or so then an update solves everything for me. What you have seen is what is supposed to happen with pure HW RAID - the OS just does not care about the internals.You cannot access the NAS folder because the ubuntu user is not the same as the NAS user who owns it. This is expected.

The command you want is chmod

you'll have to figure out where ubuntu has put that folder - ubuntu is so user-freindly that it hides stuff like that from normal users who may get confused.

probably it is in /media

ls /media

for the sake of an example, I'll pretend it is in /media/nas-device/NAS - it should be pretty obvious where it really is. If you see it in a file browser window, then you can usually read the location off its location bar (you may need to click the little pen icon on the left).

you execute

sudo chmod -R 777 /media/nas-device/NAS

which will make everything read-write-executable. See man chmod for other options.

it's not I just built it,
xfs_irecover is part of hxtools

there is also xfsr to look for...



usage: xfsr-rawsearch file seekstr [skipbytes]
seekstr may be a hexadecimal byte array like 7a4453, if it's a string, prepend an 's' character to the string.



i still have 1TB of data to resurect can you help ?

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http://rzr.online.fr/q/recover