HTPCs Nas drive failure - need advice!

Access

Posted this in the Zyxel thread in BA also... but thought i would get a better response here...

This is pure murphys law... what can go wrong will go wrong!...

I arrived home from work to find the NSA310 (its a single internal drive nas) with a red led lighting the HDD indicator on the front panel.

I take it from the manual this is indicating a hard drive error/failure. I wouldnt mind, but the hard drive is a WD caviar green 3TB and it less than 3 months old.

It says in the manual that the NSA will scan for bad sectors and restart when done. It looks like there was a power cut here at some stage today.

Should i leave it scan away till tomorrow or whenever? The NSA is pinging okay as per the instructions in the manual but seems busy in the browser when IP is entered (no login screen etc.) - I did remove the NSA hard drive, and the Zyxel operated as normal with out it. The drive is now back in it.

I have a backup of everything on the NSA, but that backup is 3 months old and i have added a fair bit of media since then.

What should i do? any way of data recovery via a usb enclosure etc with the NSA hard drive placed in it?

Im stumped.

EDIT: I have managed to see the admin screen now... its showing status as "Down" when i click on the sata volume it gives me the options on the right to edit volume/scan volume/delete volume.

But when i go to scan it shows "failed to scan" after a few seconds.

Have i lost this whole drive and all its data? anyway to recover from this? from reading online it seems that the drive is formatted to the linux standard of EXT2 or EXT3. - I have a spare pc there that i could load linux onto at a push if it allowed me to access the hard drive in a usb caddy.

I really dont want to lose this data by formatting.

Any advice?

slave1

Access wrote: »

I take it from the manual this is indicating a hard drive error/failure. I wouldnt mind, but the hard drive is a WD caviar green 3TB and it less than 3 months old.

I'm not technicaly enought to help with your quandry but I'm not surprised by a Western Digital failing, I keep all my back-up on a simple one to one ratio, for every hard drive I have I have an idential drive in a DAS setup, around 32TB at present.
I've only had 2 hard drives fail and both were WD caviar greens, both I had a full copy of so I did not need to recover the data, both returned at my expense to WD for replacement, from memory I had to run a small diagnostic file from the WD website to identify the error and then ship to the UK for the replacements.
I now revert back to Samsung and Seagate (where I've never had an issue in 20years of hard drives) on new purchases.

stephendevlin

Access wrote: »

Posted this in the Zyxel thread in BA also... but thought i would get a better response here...

This is pure murphys law... what can go wrong will go wrong!...

I arrived home from work to find the NSA310 (its a single internal drive nas) with a red led lighting the HDD indicator on the front panel.

I take it from the manual this is indicating a hard drive error/failure. I wouldnt mind, but the hard drive is a WD caviar green 3TB and it less than 3 months old.

It says in the manual that the NSA will scan for bad sectors and restart when done. It looks like there was a power cut here at some stage today.

Should i leave it scan away till tomorrow or whenever? The NSA is pinging okay as per the instructions in the manual but seems busy in the browser when IP is entered (no login screen etc.) - I did remove the NSA hard drive, and the Zyxel operated as normal with out it. The drive is now back in it.

I have a backup of everything on the NSA, but that backup is 3 months old and i have added a fair bit of media since then.

What should i do? any way of data recovery via a usb enclosure etc with the NSA hard drive placed in it?

Im stumped.

EDIT: I have managed to see the admin screen now... its showing status as "Down" when i click on the sata volume it gives me the options on the right to edit volume/scan volume/delete volume.

But when i go to scan it shows "failed to scan" after a few seconds.

Have i lost this whole drive and all its data? anyway to recover from this? from reading online it seems that the drive is formatted to the linux standard of EXT2 or EXT3. - I have a spare pc there that i could load linux onto at a push if it allowed me to access the hard drive in a usb caddy.

I really dont want to lose this data by formatting.

Any advice?

Have you any other means of testing the drive or can you get another caddy to test on a PC to see if it can get a response from the drive, software on the PC might be able to bring it back to use. First step is to see does the PC/Laptop even recognise the disk

Johnboy1951

I have a spare pc there that i could load linux onto at a push if it allowed me to access the hard drive in a usb caddy.

Run a Live Linux on the other machine (if it doesn't have an installed Linux) and connect the doubtful drive, in a USB caddy, to a USB connector, after you have booted up.

There should be a connection notification from Linux when you connect the drive.

If it is failing there are a number of utilities which can help .... testdisk & photorec come to mind.

Access

stephendevlin wrote: »

Have you any other means of testing the drive or can you get another caddy to test on a PC to see if it can get a response from the drive, software on the PC might be able to bring it back to use. First step is to see does the PC/Laptop even recognise the disk

The nas drive is formatted to a linux format (ext3 or 4 i think) windows just asks to format it when placed in a usb caddy. i did run a linux setup on a spare pc earlier and managed to get a sys image of the nas with instructions sourced from Zyxel email support (not great support to be honest!)... but dont know what to do with it? it was only about 124mb? is that right.

I will try attaching the nas drive in a usb caddy to the spare pc running linux tomorrow like johnboy was saying... will i be able to see my files like normal do you think when i do this?

On a side note zyxel support informed me to invest in a WD red hard drive instead of the green ones... red drives are built for nas - green seem to be day to day occasional use they told me. :pac:

Johnboy1951

I will try attaching the nas drive in a usb caddy to the spare pc running linux tomorrow like johnboy was saying... will i be able to see my files like normal do you think when i do this?

If the drive is still accessible you should be able to .... use whichever file manager is provided in the Linux install first to see if you can see them.

Access

Access wrote: »

On a side note zyxel support informed me to invest in a WD red hard drive instead of the green ones... red drives are built for nas - green seem to be day to day occasional use they told me. :pac:

Green drives don't have TLER which can be an issue with some RAID controllers. If a disk is taking to long to respond it will just be marked as bad and dropped from the array. Green drives don't have TLER because for non-raid use its better to let them take their time and fix the error.

It shouldn't have caused the issue in this case though.

Access

Just an update on this...

Thanks all for the replys. After a couple of frustrating evenings trying to recover the data using a usb caddy and a Linux live disk, i had to cut my losses... i could only see around 800GB of a 3TB drive and i did notice/hear the drive head parking itself every few seconds with a louder than normal volume every so often too.

Im chalking it down to just having a basic drive failure, as i was on to WD support and they have had me return the drive to them in the UK for replacement as slave1 experienced earlier too.

Ha ha... My first ever drive failure... im traumatised after it!

I have lost a bit of media but i will survive.
Think i will use the new WD drive they send back to me in a usb enclosure and just do a weekly/monthly backup of my NAS with it. (not raid, but just a one on one copy of the media from the NAS like mentioned earlier)

So now i will have to source a new 3TB drive suitable for my NAS... (was thinking of the WD red range... but might stay away from wd for a while ) any ideas?