How to Recover Data From RAID 5 on Buffalo TS5400D NAS?

[Andrew Antalik]

My RAID 5 on Buffalo TS5400D NAS don’t turn on, it may be out of order.
What should I do with all the data that’s still on the disks? (I hope that all drives are working and my data is still there)
There is no way to access the files by just connecting the disks to the computer. I can’t try replacing the device itself - there is no similar device available.
What should I do to read the disks and retrieve information from there?

 

[sedrosken]

It's my understanding that -- and correct me if I'm wrong guys, I'm not terribly familiar with hardware RAID implementations -- one typically cannot bring a RAID up on a different kind of controller than what was used to create it. Unless you get lucky with trying to bring it up with, for instance, mdadm in a Linux box, you're kind of stuck buying another TS5400D to plunk your old drives into. It's just a matter of how much your data's worth to you.

 

[LunarMist]

Buy a used one or take apart the one you have to see if it is repairable, starting with the power supply.
The drives should be fine, but be careful about accessing them with a computer that might write data.

 

[Mercutio]

Buffalo NASes run Linux and it's REALLY likely that it's just using LVM. You have two big challenges. The first is that you have to figure out the interleave order of your drives. Once that's been determined, it's mostly just a matter of patience as whatever software package you use to attempt recovery does its work.

Ages ago, had a ~16TB Windows softRAID 5 fail in a way that couldn't fix itself. I had to sit through four weeklong recovery passes to see whether RunTime's RAID Reconstructor would do it, but I was ultimately able to restore something like 99.8% of the data that had been on that volume. I had a backup of the data in question already, but it was pretty interesting to me to see if the paid application could handle it. It did. Once you figure out the interleave order, everything is much, much easier.

You probably just need to find yourself something that can handle LVM and accept that it's gonna take a while.
Also: Backups.