Update: I did find another MBWE II just like the one I have. Attempted
to switch the drives this weekend, but still did not work. Pretty much
confirms that one of the drives has failed.
This device comes preconfigured to span the two drives into one volume
by default. It does have a way to setup RAID, but I just never got
around to it; didn't expect it to fail so soon. That won't happen
again.
Unfortunately the default drive format is a Linux flavor, according to
the manual. It never specifies what flavor. I'm not a Linux guy, so I
don't have a clue where to go from here.
Sounds like I'll be sending it to a data recovery service...
And just some more FYI - the performance of this particular NAS device
is abysmal. Extremely low read and write speeds. I would not recommend
anyone purchase this. Once I get my data off, I'm just going to take
the one good drive and put it in my desktop and trash the rest.
Thanks
Bob
-----Original Message-----
From: pctech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pctech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of David Gibbs
Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2008 11:46 AM
To: PC Technical Discussion for iSeries Users
Subject: Re: [PCTECH] Western Digital My Book World Edition II NAS
device - crashed?
Bob Cagle wrote:
I have several files on here I would like to recover. Western Digital
tells me to send it into a data recovery service - minimum charge is
$500-$800. Yikes.
Sometimes I get the feeling that the data recovery service is part of
their product plan. Especially if they use a proprietary file system on
the device.
The drives are removable, so I could take them out and slave them into
another PC, and recover the data from there. Since the drives are
spanned though, I'm not sure if that would work.
Depends on the file system format, obviously. The spanning is the real
issue though. Personally, I would never use a spanning file system
unless it incorporated protection.
Or, I could buy another MBWE II device just like it, and swap the old
drives into the new device. Then, get my files off, swap the drives
again, and return the new device back to the store. This might work
assuming that the drives themselves are still good and will spin up.
Testing the drives should be pretty easy (I'm assuming they are standard
drives). Just plug them into another machine and run a disk tester.
Consider getting a copy of Spinrite from grc.com ... it will tell you if
the drive is good or bad. It might even be able to recover bad sectors.
Not sure it will understand the format though. If the drives are good,
but the hardware is going, then that plan should work. If the drives
are bad, then no amount of new hardware will help.
david
(who's probably going to buy the Netgear NAS device today, if
TigerDirect still has it in stock)
midrange.com
