Trying to recover data from a dead Iomega Storecenter

[ljarvie]

I have a very old Iomega Storecenter. Model NHDD2, which has two 250Gb IDE drives which were set for RAID 0. It appears the controller has failed. I can still access the NAS via the web interface, but it shows no drivespace.

I extracted the drive and stuck them in an old WinXP IDE machine. Using diskpart, I can see that there are paritions on each drive. A couple small ones of about 64 to 128Mb and a large one of about 233Gb, so the drives still appear functional.

I downloaded an Ubuntu distribution and put it on a USB thumb drive and booted up the XP machine using this. However I can only see the first 64Mb partition on each drive.

Admittedly, I'm VERY rusty on my Linux/Unix, so I'm looking for guidance on next steps. The more specific you can be, the better. VERY rusty.

Thanks for any help you can give.

 

[USAFRet]

Without the original RAID controller, unlikely you can get anything off of it.

The drives themselves may be functional, but the data is toast.

 

[ljarvie]

Without the original RAID controller, unlikely you can get anything off of it.

The drives themselves may be functional, but the data is toast.

Would this still be the case if the data were just spanned across the drives?

 

[USAFRet]

Without the original RAID controller, unlikely you can get anything off of it.

The drives themselves may be functional, but the data is toast.

Would this still be the case if the data were just spanned across the drives?

Especially since the data is spanned across 2 drives in a RAID 0.

 

[TyrOd]

Without the original RAID controller, unlikely you can get anything off of it.

The drives themselves may be functional, but the data is toast.

Would this still be the case if the data were just spanned across the drives?

Especially since the data is spanned across 2 drives in a RAID 0.

I"m not sure if you're saying that he just can't recover the data himself or what...because you almost NEVER need the original controller to do RAID recoveries manually.

Only exceptions are proprietary SANS like Equalogic, Compellant, VNXe and the like.

 

[ljarvie]

Without the original RAID controller, unlikely you can get anything off of it.

The drives themselves may be functional, but the data is toast.

Would this still be the case if the data were just spanned across the drives?

Especially since the data is spanned across 2 drives in a RAID 0.

I"m not sure if you're saying that he just can't recover the data himself or what...because you almost NEVER need the original controller to do RAID recoveries manually.

Only exceptions are proprietary SANS like Equalogic, Compellant, VNXe and the like.

This is what I was thinking. I'd like to at least see what's on the partition, if anything usable. Diskpart sees partitions, but I can't read them. I can't get even that far with Linux, but that's probably just because I don't know the utilities well enough anymore. Ultimately, I'd like to get it mounted and see what's there.

 

[trekzone]

You many try first getting an image of those two drives. There are data recovery applications that lets you rebuild the RAID without the need of a RAID controller but those applications are not free.

 

[ljarvie]

In the end, trekzone had it right. I ended up finding an app from Runtime software. I put the old drives into an old IDE WinXP machine I had setting in a corner, installed the software and it saw my data. They give out a trial version of the software so you can verify it'll see the data, but you need to purchase to be able to copy. One Paypal transaction later, I was copying data. Software is amazingly easy to use, although it still uses floppy disks in its animations.

Thanks for the help!

 

[AlexSha4you]

Without the original RAID controller, unlikely you can get anything off of it.

The drives themselves may be functional, but the data is toast.

That's not really true. I have one of the old one Iomega Store Center Network Hard Drive and it stopped to respond in Windows 7 but it did work with it just a few month ago without any problems.
I have removed both hard drives from the corps and connected them to my desktop computer through the SATA interface. Windows Device Manager showed them as two hard drives with perfectly healthy 3 Unknown partitions 3.92GB, 502MB and 461.35GB accordingly. I assumed that it was 2 Linux partitions and probably some kind of boot partition. So I have searched in Internet some kind of software that could help to read Linux partitions under Windows OS and found DiskInternals Linux Reader. It show me Linux Ext Volume 1(raid) 3.92GB and Linux Ext Volume 1(raid) 922.69GB and also two more Volume 3 and Volume 4. I don't remember now, but there was also some information available that there was "raid 0", that mean that these two hard drives could not be read separately. I did use Total Commander as a File Manager and it shows me in a Network Tab something like a folder named DiskInternal Reader and allowed me to read all my files there and copy them to another physical hard drive.
Good luck to everybody.