Hi all,

Context: helping a friend recover data from pieces of an unraid server which was previously administered by their significant-other. The s/o is no longer in the picture.

 

What I have:

• 6x 3TB WD Reds that probably were the main data drives (one being the parity I'm guessing)
• 1 usb drive containing unraid boot files
• no access to original chassis/cpu/psu/ram

 

What I've tried:

• plug in WD Red via external sata usb dock to other computer (drives don't seem to be able to be mounted in Ubuntu, MacOS, or Win11)
• same as above but into my own unraid box in effort to mount as unassigned device. The drive is recognized for its brand and storage capacity but the only option seems to be to format/initialize it

 

Any ideas from the community would be appreciated. Is my only option to build a kind of temporary unraid box, plug drives in directly via sata and hope it boots?

USB enclosure could complicate things so if you can plug them in directly in your server that would be ideal.

 

Parity won't be mountable because it has no filesystem.

 

Others should mount with Unassigned Devices, unless they need filesystem repair, which can also be done as Unassigned Devices.

 

Any idea what filesystem they should be?

Thanks @trurl - I don't have any free sata slots on my current server but I might be able to disconnect the cache drive and use that temporarily or pickup a cheap sata pci expansion card.

 

No idea on the filesystem but my guess is XFS as the server was built within the last few years. The details when running `diskutil` through the external HD hub wasn't giving me any clues either (it was showing "dos" format) but I guess the usb hub was the cause of that.

Edited April 7, 20251 yr by MBrady

Update: managed to free up a sata port by temporarily removing my cache drive - disks are mountable in unassigned devices. Thanks again @trurl