New NAS old HDD's! How to???

hyper_pm

Hi There! 

My NSA325v2 kicked up the bucket a few weeks ago.   I purchased a NAS 326 this week. Can someone explain to me, how can I mount the old disks (2x3TB Toshiba in RAID1) with my very important data on them? When I install the HDDs the NAS want to format them for a strange reason. Can someone do me an idiot-proof step-by-step instruction? Please keep in mind, I'm a Windows guy, so have no clue about Linux! Thank you! 

#NAS_January

Mijzelf

Unfortunately in firmware 5 ZyXEL has changed the disk arrangement. On fw 4 and older the disk had a +/- 500MB partition for system purposes, and the remaining space for the data partitions.
On firmware 5 there are 2 +/- 2GB system partitions (per disk), and the remaining space for data.

The firmware recognizes their 'own' disks on the arrangement and filesystems. So a fw 5 NAS won't recognize an fw 4 disk.

As you have raid1, it is possible to migrate the disks. Put 1 disk in the 326 and create a volume on it. Put the 2nd disk in the 326, and mount it manually in an ssh shell. Copy everything over in that ssh shell, and finally add the 2nd disk to the new volume as raid1 member.
This basically copies everything twice. And you won't have redundancy during the whole process, while especially adding the 2nd disk to the array is error prone.

If your data is valuable, you should use a 3th disk, which you can keep as backup, after migration. (You should have a backup anyway). 

hyper_pm

Thanks Mijzelf! Can you tell me how can I use this SSH and how can I mount the disk manually? 

Mijzelf

Enable the ssh service in Control Panel->Network->Terminal.

Download PuTTY , and use it to connect to the NAS through ssh. Login as root, using your admin password.

Then find the devicename of your data partition:

cat /proc/partitions<br>

It should be something like sda2 or sdb2. The sizes given are blocks, which is 1 kB.
Assemble the raid array:

mdadm --assemble /dev/md5 /dev/sda2 --run<br>

If that doesn't throw an error, mount it:

mkdir -p /mnt/mountpoint<br>mount -o ro /dev/md5 /mnt/mountpoint<br>

Now you should see your directories in /mnt/mountpoint:

ls /mnt/mountpoint<br>

Small warning: After you have assembled the array from a single disk (degraded array), you possibly can't assemble it from 2 disks anymore without rebuilding the array.
Of course the 2nd disk is also capable to be mounted as degraded array.