Data Recovery from Buffalo NAS

[Technomage]

um. recovering data on a raid 5??

is the array still intact or is it broken. if the latter, its will be 
orders of magnitude more difficult
(but still doable).

here's a clip from www.diydatarecovery.nl:
**************************************************
*Data recovery from a broken array*

Due to the parity information a RAID 5 array can survive one single disk 
failing, RAID 5 is 'fault tolerant'. The falling disk can be replaced 
(hot swapped) and the data on the disk is rebuild using the parity 
information. However due to circumstances this may fail. It can also 
happen that the RAID adapter itself fails and very often it is not 
possible to migrate an existing array to another RAID adapter. As a 
result you have a bunch of disks, all containing bits of your data but 
you can not access that data. This is where you will need true RAID 
capable data recovery software.

You will need software that can treat the separate disks as one single 
array. The software should enable the user to add disks that were part 
of the array and to configure RAID parameters such as stripe size. 
However many will not be knowledgeable enough to provide the parameter 
sets thus ideally the software should be able to detect RAID parameters 
such as stripe size and rotation (for example, in above illustration you 
see forward rotation, inverted rotation is also possible). 

As soon as the software has virtually recreated the array data recovery 
proceeds normally; the disk is being scanned for file system structures 
and a virtual file system is created from which data can be recovered. 
DIY DataRecovery iRecover <http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/irecover.htm> 
follows this procedure. Alternatively the reconstructed array is copied 
entirely to another disk or raw image file. The destination disk can 
then be analysed with any data recovery software, an image can be 
analyzed with any software that is capable of processing a raw image 
file. The latter is the method used by RAID Reconstructor from Runtime 
Software (www.runtime.org <http://www.runtime.org/raid.htm>)
***************************************************

hope this helps.


Eric Cope wrote:
> Hello all,
> My friend was running off of a Buffalo NAS, which died. Does anyone know how
> to recover his files from a RAID 5 configuration?
> Thanks,
> Eric
>
>   
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