Death and birth of data and disks

Western Digital Community - How To.

'via Blog this'

This has just saved my data. As a firmware update had bricked my WD ShareSpace, I thought it would be a cinch to mount one of the RAIDed disks and copy the contents over to a temp RAID until I find a long term solution; I was wrong. I thought I had the disks in RAID 1, but it should be easy grabbing the data off them right? hur dur.

While I thought it would be a simple case of getting an EXT3 driver for either the Mac or Win7, the RAID caused problems on the disks.

I tried:

• MacFUSE 2.0.3 with fuse-ext2 0.0.7 - nuttin'
• OSX Fuse 2.3.4 with fuse-ext2 0.0.7 - I was able to mount sdb1 but not sdb4
• explore2FS 1.07 - could read the files off the partition with the data (sda4 or sdb4), but couldn't copy them
• ext2explore 2.2.71 - nada
• ext2fsd 0.51 - could read sdb1 but not sdb4
• linux reader - no
• vv 0.7 - nein
• Ubuntu 11.10 trial off USB in Mac OS X Lion - non
• Ubuntu 11.10 trial off DVD in Mac OS X Lion - niet
• Ubuntu 11.10 trial on PC Win 7

.

.

.

.

.

.

Yay!

The link on the WD website had a nice simple run-down on the commands to get the RAID going. I didn't follow exactly and got the RAID volume going in degraded mode only using one disk. This was in case it all went wrong; I still had one disk left, see!

Once I had the Win7 notebook working and had mounted both the old RAID disk and a new drive to copy the contents, it only took 9 hours to extract the data.