Physical vs Logical: A Data Recovery Issue

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R

razzanrohr

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Sep 22, 2017
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Hello smart people, I have a Western Digital My Book World Edition II (White Light) NAS with (2) 1TB WD Caviar Green HDs, mirrored.

I have been having issues with this device and have decided the best course of action is to offload all of the data and reset the NAS back to factory defaults as well as reformat the drives.

One of the issues this NAS is experiencing is it will "fall off" the network before I can offload the data. So I figured the best option is to connect one of the drives to my laptop with a SATA/USB adapter so I can just copy the data over without messing with the network.

Now the problem is that my laptop doesn't recognize the drive.

Looking at the WD Windows Data Lifeguard Diagnostics, it shows as a physical drive, but not as a logical drive I can access.

How do I access the drive without destroying the data?

Thanks in advance for your help!

wd.png
 
Solution
Emerald
The NAS is most likely using Linux and Windows cannot read a Linux drive. In addition the drives are setup in either RAID-0 or RAID-1 which will also prevent them from being read.

If the NAS was configured in RAID-1, you could try a Live CD version of Linux and hope it will be able to read the drives.

If the NAS was in RAID-0 mode, the drives can only be read using the NAS.

Also try the WD Community forum to get additional input.
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Emerald

Emerald

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Aug 28, 2005
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The NAS is most likely using Linux and Windows cannot read a Linux drive. In addition the drives are setup in either RAID-0 or RAID-1 which will also prevent them from being read.

If the NAS was configured in RAID-1, you could try a Live CD version of Linux and hope it will be able to read the drives.

If the NAS was in RAID-0 mode, the drives can only be read using the NAS.

Also try the WD Community forum to get additional input.
 
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Solution
S

S Haran

Distinguished
Jul 12, 2013
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As Emerald states it depends on the RAID config. You state that it is a mirrored RAID1. You can confirm that via the size of the data volume the RAID presents. If it is 1TB then RAID1. If it is 2TB then RAID0.

Note it is likely your problem is due to drive issues. You might want to check the SMART health status of the drives with CrystalDiskInfo.

Assuming RAID1 and one of the mirrored drives is healthy you should be able to extract the data from Windows using Testdisk from CGSecurity. Or with a data recovery software like R-Studio or UFSexplorer. And as Emerald notes Linux is also a possible solution as the NAS operates using Linux Software RAID aka mdadm.
 
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