Recover Data from ReadyNas Duo hard drives

recover_ready_nas.sh

# Recover Data from ReadyNas Duo RAID 1 drives 
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# DISCLAIMER : This could corrupt all your data - if you are at all worried get a professional to recover the data for you
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# The tools mentioned below have the ability to corrupt and wipe all your data
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# #### USE AT YOUR OWN RISK ####
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# With that out the way....
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# It worked for me: 2 X 1TB drives, one would not even be recognised as a drive, the other would mount but with lots of IO errors.
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# You will need a new drive of the same size to clone to, and possibly another drive to then copy the files to.
# (The ReadyNas FS is a pain to mount - so I copied the repaired disk files back to OSX)
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# You will need linux to repair and mount the drives
# If your on Windows or OSX spin up a VM like ubuntu server (Alpine etc are too lightweight and don't have the tools)
# If you use a VM be sure to map the drive attached to the host over to the VM so it can access it.
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# First we need to clone one of the bad disks (from RAID 1) to a new good disk to stop IO errors when working with the disc
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# attach both the damaged and a working blank drive with equal or greater storage, and find the drive names
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sudo fdisk -l

# triple check you have the correct drive letters, if you get them the wrong way round you could wipe your data
# If in doubt unmount the good drive and check again to see whats attached as the bad drive.

# now install gddresuce: https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/
sudo apt install gddrescue

# Clone the damaged drive data to the working drive
# https://datarecovery.com/rd/how-to-clone-hard-disks-with-ddrescue/
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# There are many options for ddresuce, I went for disk-to-disk as I could not mount the drive successfully
# -f force wipe the destination drive (required for disk to disk clone)
# -r3 3 passes at recovering corrupted data (does put more strain on the drive, but worked in my scenario)
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# Copy FROM BAD drive (sdb in my case) TO GOOD drive (sdc in my case). 
# Make sure this is the correct way round or you could loose data.
sudo ddrescue -f -r3 /dev/sdb /dev/dsc /tmp/ddresuce.log

# This will take some time.  For a 1TB drive it took 30 hours to run!
# .....
# 30 hours later

# check if you can see the partition tables on the NEW drive (for me /dev/sdc)
sudo fdisk -l

# For me no devices were listed under /dev/sdc, so no partitions could be found.
# If you CAN see partitions, then skip to mounting the drive - if not....
# You need to try to fix the partition table with testdisk
sudo apt install testdisk

# and run testdisk
testdisk

# Follow the prompts (https://www.cleverfiles.com/howto/testdisk-review.html)
# > pick the new drive (dev/sdc)
# > choose EFI GPT partition table
# > Select Analyse
# > Perform a Quick Search to find the partition tables
# > If its listed with a P next to it, you can then choose "Write to disk" to restore the partition table.
# > If not, try a "Deep Search" - this can take hours (8 hrs for my 1TB drive) and then restore the table
# > Quit testdisk

# Now you have hopefully a working clone of the ReadyNas drive

# To mount the newly created clone of the drive
# Search for the LVM group name
sudo vgscan

# > Found volume group "c" using metadata type lvm2
# C is the Ready Nas Volume.

# I had issues here with a metadata error (I think this was from mounting one of the corrupted drive previously, and then mounting the clone that had the same ID)
# to fix the meta data I ran
sudo vgck --updatemetadata c

# now activate the LVM group (C being the name of the group from vgscan)
sudo vgchange -ay c

# > 1 logical volumes(s) in volume group "c" now active

# now mount the drive.
# We cant just use `mount` as the ReadyNas drives use a odd block size, so we need to use fuse
sudo apt install fuse

# using fuse mount the drive: dev/c/c being the LVM location of the good drive, media/readyNasDuo being the mount location.
fuse-ext2 -o sync_read,allow_other,rw+ /dev/c/c /media/readyNasDuo

# finally check your data
ls /media/readyNasDuo

# Next I copied this data back over to my host OSX
# I had a drive shared via VMWare, and used the vmware tools to mount the host drive
vmhgfs-fuse .host:/ /mnt/hgfs -o allow_other

# and now I could copy all the files from the new recovered NAS drive over to my host
rsync -av /medai/readyNasDuo /mnt/hgfs/myNewDrive

# And after about 24 hours of copying I had all my data back
# finally!