Qnap Hard Drive Missing

[Basa Benejan]

Iquickly got a new disk. The old disk was a WD Red 6TB WD60EFRX, the new one is a WD Red 6TB WD60AFEX. I hot-swapped the disks. According to the documentation, the new disk should be detected automatically, and the storage pool should automatically start rebuilding ("Rebuilding" state). But nothing happened.

I checked the UI, Storage & Snapshots tool. The storage pool was still in degraded state, but all four disks were now green and healthy. However, disk 3 was listed as "not a member" of the storage pool. When I selected to Manage the pool, I could do nothing. The only action that was not disabled was "Rebuild RAID Group", but when I tried that there were no free disks to add to the RAID group.

So the problem appeared to be that disk 3 had been detected and was in use, but still it was listed as "not a member" of the storage pool. No actions were available in the UI to fix the situation. Pulling out the disk and inserting it again did not change anything. Googling for help showed that others have encountered similar situations, but no solutions helped me.

For some reason the NAS did not correctly add the /dev/sdc3 disk partition to the storage pool. The disk had been correctly partitioned and the partitions formatted, and the other RAID arrays had apparently recovered, but not /dev/md1. Adding /dev/sdc3 manually to /dev/md1 fixed the problem.

One more thing: it looks like /etc/config/mdadm.conf and /etc/config/raidtab are missing. /etc/mdadm.conf and /etc/raidtab existed as symbolic links to the non-existent files. I'm not sure that they are needed, but as a precaution I created them. mdadm.conf is created like this:

I meet the same problem with my raid 1 (two ssd). When I restart my ts551, one ssd failed. The light is on and the system can read notice this disk, but raise "not a member" error when i try to rebuild raid 1. Neither can i erase it. Then I followed these instructions and it worked!

Thanks for your blog!!!

I had all the same issus as described in the post on QNAP 431P-1. One of the disks (disk 2) had failed, that the storage pool was in a "Degraded" state. Disk 2 shoud have been ok, SMART info all ok. Ran a scan for bad blocks, overnight. Came back ok & disk was green. However the raid would not rebuild & that there were no free disks to add to the RAID group. I would have followed the instructions here, but I was unable to configure SSH on in step 3 below - Unable to get a browser connection to enable SSH. By the time I followed steps 4 through 6 it had started rebuilding.

QNAP support helped to get my degraded RAID 5 array back available online, but didn't fix the replacement disk showing as not being a member.

Your information has been excellent, allowing me to add the disk back in as described.

Sincerely grateful for the clear description. All the best, Damian

I had the same issue with raid building. My Disk3 failed and I swapped it with a new drive. But the rebuilding is not happening. Now my second disk is already in a warning condition. So I am trying hard to get this raid rebuild with the Disk3.

I encountered the same problem as described above and executes all steps indicated in ssh window. All results are the same apart from the fact it concerns my sda disk instead of sdc as in the example. When trying to add the sda disk I am gettin the following error message:

mdadm --manage /dev/md1 --add /dev/sda3

mdadm: add new device failed for /dev/sda3 as 4: Invalid argument

If you only had 2 hard drives then you may not be using disk stripping and if you are very lucky reading the data on a disk will be as simple as mounting it and reading the data off. You can use Linux on a USB stick and here is how to make one: -a-usb-stick-on-windows#1-overview If you want an easy Distro to use then Puppy Linux will do the trick for you:

Raid Data Recovery Services Malaysia can recover all kind of raid system like raid0 raid1 raid4 raid5 raid6 raid10 raid jbod raid mirror corrupted raid array partition file recovery emergency situation contact raid data recovery company in KL kuala...

There is 4 bay. 2 bay faulty. Tried to recover before swap new HDD. Only 1 parent folder accessible. Should have two parent folder. I dont have time to find way to recover the other folder as user need to use the qnap. So taken out the 2 faulty hard disk and replaced it.

A four drive RAID5 would have a single drive redundancy, which means you could potentially recover your data intact as long as you had three functional drives (ie one missing or failed). When the second drive failed in your system this went beyond the redundancy of the RAID5 and this is why you would have been unable to access your data. Unfortunately if you have removed the two faulty drives and rebuilt a new RAID with the two original drives plus two new drives, then the chances of recovering data from just the two failed drives you still have would be very low. A data recovery company such as Ontrack could take a look at recovering the data from the two faulty drives AND the two other drives from the original RAID Group but as you have reconfigured these into a new RAID the logical damage would be quite severe and again the chances of recovery of your original data in good condition are slim.

The user data and parity of RAID 5 is distributed over all hard disks of the RAID, unless you configured some hard disks as spare disks. As the minimum required for RAID 5 is three hard disks, either all your 4 hard disks are operational or you configured one as spare disk. So did you configure one spare disk which should have become operational in the mean time or have all 4 hard disks been operational before your issue?

If the total number of disks in RAID5 was four and two of them failed, your data is gone. RAID5 tolerates only single disk failure -to-basics-raid-types . Since you see only one parent folder and the second one disappeared, that indicates a deep corruption of the file system.

QNAP is a company that designs great network attached storages (NAS). Unfortunately, even their NAS can crash. Mine did. Before you get to how to recover the lost data, here's my NAS and RAID spec (so that you can understand what and why I did):

Before you attach our hard drives and restore RAID, you need to know one thing: QNAP that is not a setup with at least 1 HDD, won't provide you with any tools like scp or rsync. You will be able to examine your HDDs (there's mdadm luckily), but you won't transfer your data via LAN. All network tools are only available once you perform a full setup. Also keep in mind, that you should perform a whole new installation with your RAID hard drives unplugged (just in case).

What I am trying to say is that many people use a RAID as their primary storage system, and have it configured either as a RAID 1 or 5, thinking that the redundancy of the RAID is a backup. THIS IS NOT A BACKUP SYSTEM. This was the point I was trying to make.

UPDATE: As for my current 2018 setup, I am running an iMAC with a Retina 5K Display and a 3.5GHz Processor with 1TB Storage. The daily work for the year is stored on an external 5TB drive. That drive is backed up daily using Time Machine. Every month or so (depending on workload) the backup is backed up to a WD My passport Drive and that copy is moved offsite to a safe deposit box.

The concept of a RAID is to combine multiple, less-expensive drives into a single, higher-capacity and/or faster volume. It is designed for redundancy so that the array and its data remain usable WHEN (NOT IF) a drive fails. The terms 1-disk or 2-disk redundancy refers to the number of drives that can fail with the array remaining usable.

RAID 0: Its primary purpose: faster performance. RAID 0 spreads the data across multiple drives. For example, block A is on drive 1, block B is on drive 2), and this permits increased write and read speeds. This is called striping.

RAID 0 offers no protection against drive failure, since this mode does not write any duplicate or parity information.

RAID 1: This mode writes and reads the same data to pairs of drives which is called mirroring. If either drive fails, you can continue working with the other until you can replace the bad one.

RAID 5: This mode is about both speed and redundancy. RAID 5 writes and reads from multiple disks, and it distributes parity data across all the disks in the array. Parity data is a smaller amount of data derived mathematically from a larger set that can accurately describe that larger amount of data, and thus serves to restore it. Since parity information is distributed across all the drives, any drive can fail without causing the entire array to fail.

So if you accidentally delete a file, it will instantly be removed from both mirrored copies. If your disk is corrupted by a software bug or virus, the corruption will be done to both mirrored copies simultaneously.

A BACKUP needs to be a complete and recoverable copy of your data that resides on a separate hard drive possibly even a RAID. Just DO NOT USE SOFTWARE THAT MIRRORS THE PRIMARY DRIVE TO THE BACKUP or you will run into the same problems as above with at RAID 1. Proper backup software will perform a full backup and then hourly or daily backups of changed files.

Images that are worked up for publication are exported from Adobe Lightroom and stored on my Photoshelter Archive. I trust Photoshelter and their geographically redundant archive to protect those images. If disaster were to strike, I could still export the images again from the backed up Lightroom archive.

Every year I rotate the oldest year off to a small portable drive. For these backups of the archives, I use Western Digital My Passport 2-terabyte drives. They are small and easily portable for off-site storage.

Would you be able to share what HD or SSD you chose for your work drive and daily backup drive? I think I would like the same setup because, you getting your livelihood from these files suggests to me your setup is good.

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