NAS RAID drive broken

[Levitated]

My NAS drive has stopped recognising that it has two SATA drives installed, it boots but when I admin it via the IP address it tells me that no hard drives are installed.

The two SATA drives mirror each other and are set-up as a RAID, and I tried to put one of the drives into my mac but my mac cant read it. I have been told that the NAS runs on a linux OS and that if I install the drives into a PC running linux then I should be able to read them, is this true?

My main question though is: is there anyway of accessing RAID SATA drives without the NAS?
Cheers,
Matt

[Funkstar]

What NAS box is it?

The likely hood is yes, it will be running linux. Which means the disks will be formatted to Ext2 (probably, there are other linux file systems it could be using, but ext2 is the most common).

If you have a PC (rather than a Mac) you could download one of the many linux live CDs that specialise in data recovery. These don't need to be installed, they run completely from the CD you boot the PC with. These may help you to recover your data.

What about your backups? This is a reminder that RAID volumes are not a substitute for backups. They increase your availability, but when things like this happen they are no better than a single disk.

[Levitated]

The box is a cheep "IceBox NAS4220". I thought that setting the drive up as a RAID would be the safest solution, but it seems to be proving difficult when the NAS drive fails.

Thanks for your help, I am sourcing a PC and trying your suggestion this week.

[Funkstar]

Having looked at the spec of that on Scan I would say yes, it is linux powered.

Consumer NAS boxes are not the most reliable of devices, even if they should be by now. RIAD arrays disappearing for no good reason is a common problem with most of them. Proving that a proper off-line backup is a good idea.

[Levitated]

As you suggested I have taken the SATA drive out of the NAS box and installed it into a PC running Linux (Gnome). Linux fails to mount the drive. I can see the drive using partitioning software but when I tried to mount it it brings up an error message saying that it cannot mount an unknown file format.
Would you have any suggestions as to how I can get Linux to mount the drive?
Cheers.

[peterb]

How did you set up the RAID? Did you use RAID provide by the NAS Linux software (usually MDADM) or does it use RAID using the mobo?

The reason I ask is because although RAID is two or more physical disks, it appears as one logical drive (with two elements) with code (or signatures) written to the drives that the RAID hardware/software to recognise the array - so unless you have the correct software/firmware/hardware reading the disk may be difficult.

www.runtime.org have software that can read/recreate arrays - I haven't used that particular software from them, but I have used some of their other products that seem to be OK.

Messing at this level on a disk is risky, so it would be a goog idea to get replacement drives and clone the ones that you are trying to recover the data from. Then work with the cloned drives - if you mess up, you still have the originals to make another clone to work from.