Hi all,

I've been an unRAID user since about 2005 and last night I finally messed up big. After a motherboard failure, I transferred all of my drives to an old desktop I had laying around to get back up and running. In the process I used a modular SATA power cable for my modular PSU--or so I thought. I was actually identical, but from another PSU manufacturer with different internal pin assignments. Poof. Killed four 4TB drives.

 

I'm in the process of looking into PCB replacement and HDD PCB firmware transfer services, but that could take weeks. The best thing to do would be to just leave everything be until I get the PCBs replaced and see if they come back to life. I have dual parity, so I only need two of the four to come back to life in order to recover everything.

 

However, I would like to access (read-only) the remaining files on my system without breaking parity. I'd like to assess what I might have lost without having to break parity. Then I can decide whether to bother with PCB replacement or just bite the bullet depending on what's been lost.

 

Is there a way to do this?

 

Thanks,

Ben

With the array stopped first create a mount point, e.g.:

 

mkdir /x

 

then mount a disk read only:

mount -o ro /dev/sdX1 /x

Replace X with the correct letter, you can then browse /x using the console or e.g. midnight commander and safely check the disk contents.

Nice step,  waiting for recovery.

Thought I'd mention how I recovered.

 

I sent the 4 fried circuit boards to https://www.hdd-parts.com/ (They're in Canada and so am I. Never happens). They moved the firmware chip from the bad boards to new donor boards and shipped them back. I mounted the new boards to each appropriate drive, and I'm back in action. They were absolutely fantastic to deal with. I never thought this would work in a million years.

5 hours ago, bfeist said:

Thought I'd mention how I recovered.

 

I sent the 4 fried circuit boards to https://www.hdd-parts.com/ (They're in Canada and so am I. Never happens). They moved the firmware chip from the bad boards to new donor boards and shipped them back. I mounted the new boards to each appropriate drive, and I'm back in action. They were absolutely fantastic to deal with. I never thought this would work in a million years.

 

Good to hear you got your data back. How much did they want?

$50US for each replacement board. This included moving the surface mount components from the old board to the new board. Included shipping too.

4 hours ago, bfeist said:

$50US for each replacement board. This included moving the surface mount components from the old board to the new board. Included shipping too.

 

That was a very nice price. Lots of recovery options adds one or two digits more in the recovery price.