Iomega double disk failure

[katmullinax]

Hello,

I am not particularly computer savvy but will do the best I can to explain the situation.

I have a small business and we store files on an Iomega StorCenter ix2. For no known reason, the unit was no longer visible on the network. We called our IT person who connected both drives to a pc and while the drives said "healthy" they showed up as an "unknown partition" and the data could not be accessed. We called Iomega and they told us to send the unit to them for a minimum data recovery charge of $1500. Can you suggest a way for us to recover the data?

side note: the first Iomega server we purchased was a little over 1 year ago. We had it replaced in Oct '09 because it did not work properly. We are told that our present unit is not under warranty from the date we received it, but the date the previous faulty unit was received. I hate Iomega.

thank you.

 

[lp231]

Did your IT guy took the HDD out of the nas box and hooked it up directly to a PC?

If yes, then one possible reason your HDDs says "unknown partition" as your IT guy hooked it up to a PC is due to RAID. Since this is a NAS box, it will be in some sort of RAID mode or JBOD. Now in order for you to access your data, you need to hook the drive back up to the Iomega NAS box as it has a RAID controller which will detect the drives and display the proper partition.

3 options:

Option 1: Send drive back to manufacture and pay the $1500 for data recovery service

Option 2: Hope it's just the controller that's busted and get another one of the same model. Take it apart (no more warranty) and hook up the drives with the data in it and hope for the best.*

Option 3: Try different cables? Maybe a faulty ethernet cable? or Bad power?

http://iomega.com/nas/us-nas-comp.html


* not guarantee as later models can be revised, do this at your own risk.

Lesson here is to have more than one backup source if your data are that important.

 

[katmullinax]

yes, he did take them out of the nas box and connected them directly to the pc. I will give him this info and purchasing another unit is about $200 so well worth the try. Thanks so much.
Kat

 

[katmullinax]

follow up to this issue, we received the new NAS (identical unit) and connected the old drives, but had the same result as before. The unit flashes blue - which means the drives are not "ready" and while you can hear the drives start up - they still do not appear on the network when all is properly connected.

How often do two disk drives fail simultaneously?

We did try different cables, no luck.

Is there any other info that would help you suggest other remedies?

thanks again for your help.

 

[fzabkar]

The two disks could appear to fail simultaneously if they are members of a striped volume (RAID 0). If one drive fails, then the whole array is broken.

Furthermore, the reason that neither is visible to your Microsoft OS may be that the NAS is using a Linux file system.

Could we see the partition table and boot sector of each drive with Microsoft's Sector Inspector?
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt which you can then upload to a file sharing service so that we can examine it.

You could also verify your drive's hardware using a comprehensive SMART diagnostic. Look for reallocated, pending, or uncorrectable sectors.

HD Sentinel (DOS / Windows / Linux):
http://www.hdsentinel.com/

HDDScan for Windows:
http://hddscan.com/

See this article for SMART info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

BTW, you can tell whether your RAID was striped if the capacity of the logical volume is double the capacity of each drive. Otherwise, if the array is mirrored (RAID 1), then the logical capacity will the same as the physical capacity of a single drive.