"At this point I think that data recovery would be the best route to go from here."
Agreed, and I am slowly trying to take that route - buying up hard drives like they were going out of fashion to backup the original Terastation drives onto so that I don't inadvertantly damage the data any further.
I have so far backed up all partitions on all drives (awaiting more drives so I can make backups of whole drives too) so that I can work on the partitions that the Terastation has re/created in getting it working again. At least this has shown that there's no actual hardware fault with the drives.
However, I would appreciate some help in rebuilding the data, help that can PROBABLY only come from Buffalo, as you know more about how your hardware works than anyone else does/can. There don't appear to be any superblock in the first data partition, which suggests that the Terastation may build the array each time it boots.
1. Can you confirm this?
2. The drive says it is "spanning". Can you possibly confirm what RAID level this is?
3. I suspect that my drive was reformatted with RAID level 0 for speed, back when we bought it. Is there any way to determine what the RAID level was before recovering the Terastation reformatted the unit? For example, if "spanning2 isn't the default RAID level, would this sugegst that "spanning" was the level in use before reflashing the Terastation?
Many thanks for your help. I've now got 4 seperate drives which need to be recombined, and I have a spare x86 and Linux to do the job with, but it would be terribly helpful to have "missing gaps" in the data available.
4. Like, potentially, what the 5 partitions per drive are used for/contain (obviously the last partition on each drive is the data, as it's the big one! But do the others hold any data - however cryptic - that could help the data recovery process?(