amuletxheart

ALL HOPE WAS NOT LOST!!! HUGE SUCCESS!!! Thanks to your post on cgsecurity and https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID_Recovery, I managed to regain access to my files. I just subscribed to a 1 year subscription of CrashPlan as it's on promotion. I also bought a 4TB Seagate for local backup. I don't want such a tragedy to happen again. I spent the last week of my life frantically trying to recover my files and I cry myself to sleep every night (just kidding) as I would have lost my entire anime/music/movie/personal photo collection. Thanks everyone once again for all your help.

I initially expanded 1 drive at a time but I got impatient and added the remaining 2 drives together. Now I deeply regret this decision. I don't think I have 2 RDMs mapped to a single drive. I have double checked the serial numbers and also the 2 drives have different model numbers. One is an original Samsung HD204UI, the other is a Seagate RMA unit with ST2000DL004 model. An interesting thing is that my motherboard has a very unique SATA port layout. 6 SATA 2 ports come off the Intel X58 chipset, while 4 more SATA 2 ports come off the "GIGABYTE SATA2 chip" which is a "JMB363 SATA/IDE Controller" after some digging with the PCI ID. The JMicron controller only supports 2 ports, so a JMB322 ports multiplier is connected to each channel to split it into 4 SATA 2 ports. The 2 drives are initially connected to 2 ports on the same channel. I don't know whether this is related to my problem but I have since moved all the hard drives to be connected to the Intel chipset but the problem persists. When connecting the original 4 drives, the volume appears the same as "crashed". The files are totally unavailable in file station and the capacity shows up as "-GB/-GB". The same situation occurs when only the "not initialized" drive is attached to the DSM VM and not the "crashed" drive. When only the "crashed" drive is attached to the VM and not the other, the files become available again, same as I described in the first post. I have tried running e2fsck -v -y -f on the volume in the DSM linux terminal according to this article but the problem persists. http://shankerbalan.net/blog/rescue-cra ... gy-volume/ Now I've installed Ubuntu on another computer and I'm currently in the process of connecting the drive to this computer and see how Ubuntu sees the drives. http://www.synology.com/en-global/support/faq/579

I tried to do that but the update just fails after downloading. You have to change the Nanoboot image to the latest version and apply the patches again. Your settings will still be retained with the new version if you choose that option during the installation of DSM.

Ahh, another one bites the dust. I can't help you sorry, maybe someone else can. Warning for the future or other users: RDM does not pass SMART data along so XPenology can never know when a disk is failing. Set it up in ESXi or use passthrough. I have taken the disks and connected them directly to another PC. There's nothing wrong with them and the data is still there. I think this is a logical problem that somehow DSM has corrupted the partition table or something similar to that.

I upgraded to the latest version of DSM and everything went well. I added another disk to expand my volume from 3 disks to 4 disks, and everything was fine. However, when adding 2 more disks, my volume crashed. More details in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3290

I have an ESXi server running DSM as one of the VMs. The hard disks are passed through to the DSM VM using virtual RDM. I started with a 3 disk SHR volume and everything was fine. I then expanded the volume by adding another disk and it become a 4 disk volume. Again, everything was fine. Finally I added my remaining 2 disks to make it a 6 disk volume. The expansion had gone wrong and 1 of the disk shows up as "not initialized" and the other as "crashed". I believe my data is still fine as I can still access the files through the network. When I double click on the files they open up fine without any signs of corruption. However, when I try to copy the same file to my local hard drive, Windows gives me this error. This happened with a lot of the files, not just 1 or 2. I tried to download the same files using the Synology web interface. It gives me a zip file of the folder but upon extraction, some (not all) of the files are corrupted. The log in the web interface had a lot of errors. Files without thumbnails are corrupted: I also tried to attach another drive to the DSM VM directly and attempt to backup data to it using the built in DSM backup application. I left it going overnight but it failed after a few hours of progress. I build the server from old parts with the following specs: i7 920 @ 4GHz OC + gigabyte ex58-ud5 with 24GBs of RAM. I'm using Crucial m500 240GB for ESXi and the DSM VM, as well as 6 other 5400rpm 2TB hard disks for the data storage. At this point I'm desperate so any help would be much appreciated.

I registered my account just to thank you for the help. I have successfully installed DSM on my ESXi 5.5 home server. I'm just using old second hand consumer components so I hope I don't get any long term stability issues, especially with overclocking. The specs are i7 920 @ 4GHz OC + gigabyte ex58-ud5 with 24GBs of RAM. I'm using Crucial m500 240GB for ESXi and the DSM VM, as well as 6 other 5400rpm hard disks for the data storage. This will host other VMs in the future as well for software development and testing purposes. I think that the hardware is overkill and storing my data using virtual RDM is not a good idea. I assume that if I lose my hardware I can just redo the installation on another machine and data on my existing disks will still work? How do I install this on the hardware itself instead of installing on ESXi? I assume it would involve a USB stick but is there anyway I can just install Nanoboot on the SSD itself? I hope you can also do a short guide on how to do a direct installation.