Recovering Data from Synology Crashed Deivce

In the past I’ve recovered data from RAID devices, but I’ve always had to rebuild these arrays which was time consuming. I probably missed something along the way since I didn’t have to perform in a long, but I was surprised to see how easy it was.

I had a Synology DS918+ which had some hardware failures. It consisted of a total of four drives as part of a RAID 5. The following entails the very few steps I had to go through to access the RAID and recover data.

Take note this was done on an Ubuntu 18.04 OS, and the four hard drives were attached via StarTech disk duplicators via USB. However, if you have a desktop with suffiecent SATA ports available it will all do the same. The most important part here is attaching all harddrives to the computer via some form or the other.

Then you proceed by installing mdadm as such:

sudo apt-get install mdadm

mdadm is a Linux utility used to manage and monitor software RAID devices. It is used in modern GNU/Linux distributions in place of older software RAID utilities such as raidtools2 or raidtools. It is also a free software maintained by, and copyrighted to, Neil Brown of SUSE, and licensed under the terms of version 2 or later of the GNU General Public License.

After that we have to install the lvm2 package with the following commands.

sudo apt-get install lvm2

LVM2 refers to the userspace toolset that provide logical volume management facilities on linux. It is reasonably backwards-compatible with the original LVM toolset.

To use LVM2 you need 3 things: device-mapper in your kernel, the userspace device-mapper support library (libdevmapper) and the userspace LVM2 tools. Please look at http://sources.redhat.com/dm/ for information about the device-mapper kernel and userspace components.

Next, we want to mount the device RAID via the following command.

sudo mdadmm -Asf && vgchange -ay

Once you’ve completed the prior commands the device should show up in “other devices” of your file manager. If not reboot the computer, and check once more.From there you can explore the device and extract whatever data you need.

Hope you have fun extracting your needed data 🙂