[Recovering Data from Drives with damaged DSM 7 Installation]

Hi Everyone,

 

I have a huge problem and I'm hoping to solve (or at least mitigate it) it with your help.

Here's my apocalyptic scenario:

1. Until last week I had a fully working XPenology DSM 7.1 3622xs+ on BareMetal installed via Tiny Core RedPill. For unknown reasons, after another power break, the DSM web interface breaks resulting in a no longer accessible page. The OS is still there, the loader still works and loads the system, making it visible even via the Synology Assistant but there's no way to get to the interface again.
2. I tried to reinstallthe DSM, hoping for the installer to see the disks with already present data but they looked like "new" to the installer. Installation failed systematically at 55%.
3. I rebuilt the tinycore pendrive and reinstalled. This time the installation arrived to its end but (even after the usual 10 minutes to wait for the system to reboot) for some unknown reason the server wasn't available. This time not even the Synology Assistant could see it anymore.

 

At this point, my only objective has become to "just" recover the data so - while panic starts to rise - I started researching: my system was running 4x4TB units (WD Red) configured in RAID0 for a total available space of about 8TB with BTRFS filesystem so basically data has to be recovered from 2 of the 4 physical drives.

 

1. I saw there's a driver allowing Windows to see BTRFS and I installed it on my laptop so I took the disks out of my XPenology build and plugged them into my drive docking station connected to one of my Windows Laptops. Disks are seen by the OS's disk utility but not accessible. They result as "not formatted".
2. I tried then to use Paragon Partition Manager, hoping to get to access the disks' content. No progress.
3. Then I installed a BTRFS data recovery utility (on Windows) for damaged drives and while it started scanning one of the drives it started finding some "familiar" stuff.

 

I am now literally stuck into deciding whether to give up and say forever goodbye to my data or to keep fighting what in the end could still be a losing game but I am a fighter.

 

• My next step would be to try to access the drives with a Linux (instead of a Windows) machine, which should support BTRFS, but maybe some of you has some experience already thus I ask the question "is it worth trying?"
• Also I wonder, on top of all this, if maybe there is a way to make everything "visible" if I firstly install a new XPenology DSM 7.1 3622xs+ on the same machine with a separate empty drive and then I start connecting the disks once I get this new system fully up and running.

 

Has anyone of you experienced a similar issue and found a solution? If yes, how did that happen?

 

I do not have other ideas about how to solve this problem so I'm open to any possible constructive advice.

 

Thanks a lot in advance just for the patience to read this post!

[TinyCore RedPill Loader (TCRP)]

I managed to run DS3615xs on BareMetal having my NIC recognised after having included all the Realtek extensions (r8169, r8168, r8152, r8125, r8101).

 

However, even though I could see the DiskStation in the LAN via the web browser, it gave me an error due to the failure of the SATA controller.

I am sure it is a matter of drivers/extensions since during the building of my tinycore build I encountered the following:

 

It looks that you will need the following modules : 


Found VGA Controller : pciid 8086d00000162  Required Extension : i915
Searching for matching extension for i915
Found SATA Controller : pciid 8086d00001c02  Required Extension : ahci
Searching for matching extension for ahci
Found SATA Controller : pciid 1b4bd00009215  Required Extension : 
No matching extension

 

So is there any way to provide drivers or extensions for the two SATA controllers?

 

 

 

My hardware build:

Motherboard: Asus P8H61-I LX

CPU: Intel i3 3245

 

[TinyCore RedPill Loader (TCRP)]

28 minutes ago, adamadam said:

I was able to run ds3615xs, below the screen.
I made a clean tinycore pendrive and on it:
sudo ./rploader.sh update now
sudo ./rploader.sh serialgen DS3615xs now
sudo ./rploader.sh identifyusb now
sudo ./rploader.sh satamap now
SataPortMap = 6, DiskIdxMap = 00
I left these two parameters aside as the satamap detected them.
I added this:
sudo ./rploader.sh ext bromolow-7.0.1-42218 add https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pocopico/rp-ext/master/mpt2sas/rpext-index.json

Then:
sudo ./rploader.sh build bromolow-7.0.1-42218

The drives are working, but I am not satisfied because the ds3615xs is only two cores and my i5-4690 has 4 of them, I performed tests via ssh, it shows correctly that there are 4 cores, their speed is also not correct, I do not know how to understand it, does synology indicate incorrectly? However, when creating virtual machines later, I will be limited.

I did the same procedure for the 918+ adding mpt2sas but there is a disk 5,6 error after detecting the drive. Interestingly, if only the drives under the h310 hearts are connected, it enters.

 

Can you tell what is your hardware on which the system works?

[TinyCore RedPill Loader (TCRP)]

I am trying to figure out how to include the extensions in the loader. I haven't found any way of doing it.

Could someone help me in understanding this?

 

Thanks