TS-212P – Need help recovering old RAID1 data after replacing both drives and updating QTS

English Storage
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Hi everyone,

I am hoping someone experienced with the older QNAP CAT1 models can help me with a data recovery problem.

I have owned a QNAP TS-212P for approximately 10 years and have been very happy with it. It has mainly been used as private storage for family photographs and personal files.

Over the years I upgraded the disks several times. My previous configuration was:

  • QNAP TS-212P

  • 2 × 1 TB HDD

  • RAID 1

The RAID contained very important family photographs, including photographs of my children from birth onward.

Later, I removed both 1 TB disks and installed two new 2 TB disks. I created the new storage on those disks and also updated QTS.

The problem is that I can now no longer access the data on the original two 1 TB RAID1 disks.

When I put the old disks back into the TS-212P, the old volume/data is not available. Connecting the disks to a Windows PC also does not provide access to the files.

Both original 1 TB disks are still in my possession.

There have previously been some attempts to inspect/access the disks from the command line. Because the photographs are irreplaceable, I do not want to perform any more operations that could alter the disks until I understand the safest recovery procedure.

My main questions are:

  1. Is there a safe way to determine whether the original RAID1 metadata and data partitions are still intact?

  2. Can one member of this old TS-212P RAID1 normally be mounted or recovered independently?

  3. What is the safest READ-ONLY procedure to inspect the disks without changing RAID metadata or filesystem contents?

  4. Should I first make sector-by-sector images/clones of both 1 TB disks and perform all recovery attempts only on the copies?

I specifically do NOT want to initialize, format, rebuild, repair or resync anything on the original drives.

If useful, I can provide the exact partition tables, mdadm information, filesystem information and the history of the previous command-line recovery attempts.

Any help from people familiar with TS-212P / older CAT1 QNAP RAID1 layouts would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.