Buffalo Forums

I bought a Buffalo Linkstation Quad in April 2010 (can't remember if it is the "pro" model or not).  I had configured it to run on raid 1 (mirrored) on a 1TB hard disk.  Six months ago, the Linkstation station was turned off and I removed one of the hard disk out.  

 

At present date, I have the one hard disk but not the Linkstation Quad anymore.  How can I access the data within the hard disk?  I tired the following and all did not work.

 

1)       Plug it into Windows XP.  From Disk Management, it shows the hard disk with 4 partitions but with unknown file structure.

 

2)       Plug it into Linux/Ubuntu/Debian.  All three will say "unknown filesystem type 'linux_raid_member'".

 

3)       Plug it into a newly bought LinkStation Quad Pro (LS-QVL/E).  It had a continuous blinking green light.  (Plugging a new hard disk would startup in couple minutes).

 

 

How can I retrieve the data back from the mirrored harddisk?  Are there some special software or OS that I could used?  Many thanks.

plug the HDD back into your Windows OS and run UFS explorer to try and recover the data.

Hey, works great.  Thanks.

Is it possible to access Raid5 data on the 4 disks from LinkStation QVL?

This should apply to the 4 disk in raid 5, You will need ufs explorer.

http://www.ufsexplorer.com/inf_terastation.php

Thanks! I can access my raid5 via UFS Explorer.

By connecting all 4 drives to my PC, and using UFS Explorer, I can find the data in the LS-QVL Raid 5 array. and can now locate the damaged HD - Disk 3. It cannot be loaded directly via SATA in my PC (Windows 7 cannot start when it seems constantly checking that disk, so I connect it via a SATA-USB dock, and find there are bad sectors in HD3)
But it is strange that there are several partitions in the raid array:
a SGI XFS Partition, which has the data previously stored on that raid 5
a Ext2/3/4 partition, which has folders of bin, boot, dev, etc, 
and a RAW partition.
On the tree root of UFS Explorer there is also a Raid1 (4 drivers), it includes only a Ext2/3/4 partition, with lost+found, uImage.buffalo, u-boot_lsqvl.bin, etc.


What does Ext2/3/4 partition stands for? Why the Raid1 (4 drives) does not show the SGI XFS partition? Can I rebuild the raid 5 on LS QVL and How? Can I post image here?

Thanks!

EXT stands for Exteneded systemfile, so ext2, ext3, ext4 just means Second Extended systemfile, third, fouth. These are format types. Like ntfs or fat/fat32. These are mostly used in a linux OS which the Buffalo Nas use. They are there to hold the system files, back of system files and compress files for the system. Not sure what the Raw is used for. 

To my understanding raw is not used space.. or a unrecognized format. The ext partitions are probably in a raid 1 spanning from pair to pair so if 2 disk fail you can still get in to the units os and fix it, or if 3 disk. Think of it as a fail safe though if the raid gets corrupted, that wont be any use.

The reason the sgi xfs doesnt show up with that option is because that is not a raid one. its a raid 5.

You can not rebuild the raid in ufs. If you want you can try to insert the good disk in the unit. Make sure they go to the correct slot. Do not move them around.

You can post images here as long as they are towards the issue etc.

Thanks joma! I replaced disk 3 with a new HD and rebuilt the raid on QVL. It works now.