DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

axelfooly wrote:

The drive controler on one of my HD's burnt out - and now prevents the entire system from starting as it shorts out the power supply.  I've got another drive; same manufacture HDD, board revisions and all that.  If I were to find a T6 bit and swap the dead board for the new one would I be able to get the new controler to drive the old patters - saving all the info on my RAID1??

I have recovered a drive by doing just this.  It took a while before a replacement with the same controller revision came up on ebay though.  The drive came straight back to life with the new controller and has been in service for ages now.  No data loss.  However, this was a standalone drive directly attached to a pc.

Saying that, you have 2 options (which may or may not work):

1: dig out your T6, replace the controller, search on this forum on how to update the hdd serial number (stored in flash) manually.  telnet in (assuming you have telnet access to your dns323) and update the flash with the new serial number (I assume the hdd serial number is stored on the controller).  Power down, insert the drive (you may need to reverse this step, I don't know), power up and see what happens!

or

2: pull the remaining drive, stick it in a windows PC running the ext2 fs driver http://www.fs-driver.org/ access the pulled drive and copy all of your data (it would be wise to do this before trying the other method mentioned in option 1 above) to a backup source, or boot into linux (either an installed version or one on a livecd (such as ubuntu)) and mount the directly connected hdd and copy your data to a backup source.

If it were me I would go for 2: pull drive, insert into a pc, mount it (windows/linux), copy data to a backup source, replace dead controller, put both drives back into 323, format them/set up as raid1, copy all data back from backup to 323.  But if you go for this, make sure that you test/trust that integrity of the backup that you have made before you take any of the destructive steps.  The reason that I would go for this method, is, as I think many people here will agree, the raid1 implementation on the 323 (and a lot of 'home/personal' NAS units is a bit flakey/temperamental.

One final thing, make sure that you label the drives r/h and l/h when you pull them from the 323, if, when you reinsert them, you reverse the order, you are going to create more problems.

hth
lu