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B3 is dead

Posted: 08 Jan 2020, 19:12
by Bjoerk
Hello

My B3 died and I NEED the data. I have a RAID and I thought that was safe ... Now the light of the main unit is red, the machine doesn't boot and I don*t see what I can do to access it. I tried opening it (maybe that was a mistake) and connect the hard drives to my computer using a USB interface but I couldn't see either drive on my Windows PC.

Does anybody have any suggestion of how to get my data back

Regards,
Carl

Re: B3 is dead

Posted: 09 Jan 2020, 04:25
by Gordon
RAID is overrated. A common mistake is that people don't watch the logs and end up running with one of the disks broken for an extended period of time. To really protect your data you need to make backups and you should preferably store these off-site.

So no, the disks will not be readable on a Windows system. You require either Linux or Mac. Luckily it's quite hard to actually break a B3, so you may still be able to use it. Get yourself a copy of Bubbagen Live USB. This will run from a (supported) USB stick without a disk being installed in the B3 itself. If the light still stays red, try swapping the power supply with the one from the eSata enclosure. Should you be able to boot into a green front light situation you can then try to access the disk by connecting it to the second USB port.

Note: Bubbagen cannot automatically mount the old disk because of the softraid that is configured on it. You will need to get into the ssh console and manually discover and mount the data volume:
  1. run `vgscan` - this will return you the Volume Group name
  2. run `vgchange -a y <Volume Group name>` - this will register the volumes to the system so you can mount them
  3. run `mkdir -p /home/storage/extern/oldhome` - this will be the mount point through which you can access your data
  4. mount the data volume: run `mount /dev/<Volume Group Name>/<Logical Volume Name> /home/storage/extern/oldhome`
if you point your browser to http://b3/ you will see the interface that I assume you are familiar with. Create a normal user and then use those credentials to access the `storage` share from your Windows machine.