I have QNAP TS-364 with QuTS Hero and attached TL-D800C expansion unit. I have been using NAS with storage pools build opon HDDs in NAS and Expansion unit HDD as separate ext4 drives with no problems till yesterday.
Yesterday I came up with idea of creating RAID 5 in expansion unit using 3 of 8 disks. After creation of a new storage pool in expansion unit all other disks disappeared from External Storage listing. They became only available for creation of other storage pools. As I had some data on these 5 disks - I deleted newly created storage pool and tried to read data from any of the disks that werent part of storage pool. They all became Uninitialized and unreadable. I have tried testdisk to recover data with no success.
I guess I wrongly understood warning before creation of new storage pool as I belived the process of storage pool creation will only clear 3 disks that will be used for that storage pool - not all in expansion unit:(
Please help, any ideas how to read this 5 disks or recover data with folders structure?
All 8 HDDs in expansion unit were formated as EXT4 drives. I was using them in pairs with some backup jobs between them. I wanted to upgrade them to 3 x storage pools: 2 x RAID 5 and 1x RAID 1. Started with first 3 disks (data was copied to other 5). I was planing to do step by step upgrade:(.
All disks before storage pool creation looked like this:
So they were all single drives, might be worth contacting QNAP via ticket.
Backups should always be done externally, as you just found out, the internal NAS drives could all be kicked off at any time and then you cannot read them.
I will check the UFSExplorer tool and try rising a ticket. I am surprised though that I haven’t found others that made same mistake (maybe I am specially dumb:))
I am pretty sure you can have a mix on that JBOD enclosure, so it’s either a bug or you did maybe click on something wrong. I know QNAP words the notice that all disks are erased (of the disks that are put in a certain new array), strangely and many people have asked about it and were worried that ALL disks on the NAS would be erased
BTW - I already scanned first disk with UFSExplorer and managed to recover full file system structure. It has all become a valuable lesson with happy ending.
All 8 disks in expansion unit were configured as separate Devices/Partitions (nonRAID) with EXT4 filesystems. They were managed in External Storage tab.
Unfortunately, resolution to my problem is to recover data with UFSExplorer one drive by one and copy data into newly created RAID setup (as initially intended).
