Thecus N4100 RAID problems

[poehere]

Hi:

Brief description of problem: Received N4100 in for recovery. It had gone to a repair shop before arriving here to me. The repair show saw a problem in heating up of the controller and determined one or more drives caused this problems. Instead of hot swaping drives they pulled out all 4 drives and put them in freezer for 4 hours to see if controller would work again. After reinstalled drives to controller and tried to boot controller with same problem. Shut down again N4100 and returned to the client the controller.

I was able to clone all four drives with special imaging tools that I have. I have verified the clones against Winhex and they are exact for what each drive has. The problems in the drive are minor problems and I was able to fix each drive prior to cloning these drive.

Have reinstalled all drives back into controller. Installed software and have Admin Web GUI access to the controller again. My problem is that the drives are now recognized inside the controller but all drives show status of OK but also show N/A for RAID on the drives. It was originally configured as a RAID 5 and used 64KB set up on the disk when configured. I can see some of the configuration for the company and user group and admin informaiton but I can not get the controller to try and rebuild after it was taken off line and then drives put in freezer and put back inside the controller. I do not think there was config.bin file saved from this controller prior to it going down. I have made a config.bin file now of the current configuration but I am not sure this will be of any good on this problem to try and reconstruct or rebuild this RAID. I was in hopes after reading up on this controller and finding that even if controller is taken off line it is possible to go to Admin Web Gui and add one disk as a spare and rebuild this controller. But considering it is not even seeing the original RAID configuration it is not possible to do this one.

I have several DR programs that will handle Linux and XFS file systems. Drives are all configured in three partitions. Original drives are Maxtor 500GB Serial ATA drives. I have now installed inside the controller to test Hitachi 500GB ATA drives.

Is there any possiblility with the four original drives to try and rebuild or reconstruct this degenerated RAID controller. I am able to read some of the data off the drives I am working with which are all cloned drives but in all configurations I find the same data for each recovery attempt on this one.

I am finding some photos which are about half a photo and the second half of the photos is all grey. I have some photos which start off with one photo, then a second photos is next and the ending of the photos is all grey.

Any suggestions or help on this would be greatly appreciated I would really like to reconstruct this raid and retrieve the data that is on the disk.

Thank you for all help in this mater.

[Thecus - Ivan]

Dear poehere,

Please go to our Esupport and submit a ticket for our tech support team to assist with your query.
_____________________________

Official Thecus Support Representative

[poehere]

Thank you so much Ivan I will submit a ticket to your support and see if it is possible to assist me in the rebuild of this degenerated raid server.