bricked-help

[CL]

Hi,

I was having trouble where my dns-323 running latest firmware would freeze (it happened about 5 times in 2 weeks)..  Each time I could only unplug it and plug it in again.  When fschk completed, all seemed fine.  I think my troubles are because the drive failed.  The last time I managed to boot it, I was getting "short write" errors and weird things happened like "libncurses noy found when i typed ls".  I tried the force check from alt-f gui, but the issue is that it was /dev/sdb4 partition that had the problem (my root file system....which wasn't raided).  So after the force check seemed to finish (24 hours), I tried to unplug and boot again and I was left with only 2 red solid leds  for the drives.

I took the drive in question out and put it in an enclosure and examined it from a Linux box.  The lost+found is full of lost inodes (I mean maybe thousands).  The rootfs partition only has alt-f.log  ffp  .systemfile and the huge lost+found directory.

What I am wondering is if it is possible to:

1) buy a new 1.5 TB drive (the original drive size)

2) partition it as the old one was.

3) use dd to write the files from alt-f fireware bin file to new 1.5 TB drive. 

4) put it back in the dns 323 and let the raid rebuild and have my good 'ole dns 323 back.

5) or use some variation of this

I guess that the big part of my problem is that this happened on the root file system.

I at first thought I could just switch the left and right drive around, but I don't think that will work and that I might lose all of my data, (I believe /dev/sda4 is completely empty but I haven't looked at it yet from the enclosure)

any help is greatly appreciated!

crawford