Hi Donald,
in case you haven sorted out the problem with your LS mini yet.
I had exactly the same problem.
Buffalo support couldn't help either as the unit failed to enter into emergency mode, hence declared the unit dead and offered replacement (of course with loss of data).
As the latter was not an option, I searched on the web and found some hints and possible solutions to recover the data.
After opening the unit, and connecting one of the mirrored SATA drives through a USB SATA dock to my linux PC, I first tried to mount the XFS partitions which failed due to "damaged superblocks". Fortunately I also found a program called xfs_repair which partially fixed the superblocks, recovering most (~99%) of my data and also the folder structure in a lost&found folder (actually the recovered folders were almost hidden in a bunch of generated recovery folders).
Of course no guarantee that this will work for you. If you want to give xfs_repair a try, please first run it with -n (no modification option) to see what it would do if run without -n. Maybe also backup the drive before attempting recovery.
Finally, if xfs_repair also doesn work, you may want to try a low-level disc reading tool, which scrapes the data from the drive by reading every block trying to detect certain file/bit signatures. I tried this first (before finding xfs_repair) and it managed to recover a lot of data, too, but did not recover the file/folder structure, thus leaving me with 150k! sequentiall numbered/named files in 1200! generated recovery folders. But if it is total data loss vs. a heap of unsorted files, this might still be better than nothing.
Kind regards,
Sven
P.S. What I find rather questionable is Buffalos policy of not supporting data recovery (not even as an option) for "bricked" units, and basically barring users from any attempts at self-help without loss of warranty. Personally I think Buffalo should allow user to claim the warrants, but still permit them to try themselves to recover data before returning the unit (or alternatively, returning the drives to the user for self-recovery attempts after verifying that the unit was still untouched in line with warranty terms when the problem occured.).
