How to recover data from defected Synology

[trian]

Hi,
I'm completely new to XPenology concept, so apologies in advance. Please guide me even if I am in the wrong forum.

 

We had a RS815RP+ running DSM 5.2-5967 (update 6, I think) which served as common storage of 3 VMware ESXi servers. The connection between ESXi and NAS was via iSCSI/LUN. Unfortunately, the device broke down and now I am looking for a straightforward way to recover my VMs.
Since the HDDs are in good health, I managed to mount them on a PC but the content is not what I expected to see. Below is a very short list from its root file system:

 

[root@recoverypc synology]# ls -l
total 3380
drwxrwxrwx 6 root root 4096 Apr 27 2018 @appstore
-rw------- 1 root root 10240 Sep 16 2020 aquota.group
-rw------- 1 root root 13312 Sep 16 2020 aquota.user
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 Sep 14 2016 @autoupdate
drwxr-xr-x 6 1024 users 4096 Nov 17 2016 @database
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 Dec 25 22:22 @EP
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 Jun 11 2016 @iSCSITrg
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 May 8 2015 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 8 2015 @S2S
-rw------- 1 root root 3649536 Nov 1 2016 @smbd.core
-rw------- 1 root root 5120 May 15 2015 synoquota.db
drwxrwxrwt 3 root root 4096 Sep 29 12:27 @tmp
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 28672 Jul 6 2015 winbindd_cache.tdb


[root@recoverypc synology]# ls -lh \@EP
total 11430513168
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.1T Sep 29 12:28 EP_BUF
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.1T Sep 29 12:28 EP_DAT_00000
-rw------- 1 root root 4.1T Sep 29 12:28 EP_DAT_00001
-rw------- 1 root root 2.7T Sep 29 12:28 EP_DAT_00002
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.1T Sep 29 12:28 EP_FRI
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.1T Sep 29 12:28 EP_ROD
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4.1T Sep 29 12:28 EP_TBL

 

From Synology Support they said that the recovery will be possible only if a new Synology NAS is used to replace the old one. Since I'm not going for a new Synology again, I would highly appreciate some instructions on how to use XPenology in order to access my VMs (vmdk, vmx, etc)?

Thanks in advance.

[AntonV]

I had similar issue with having SCSI LUNs in Synology's proprietary ADVANCED format.
I had my RAID1 broken. I restored it manually, but before tried to extract data.
The only tool I found which says it can deal with Synology LUNs is Reclaime and Reclaime Pro.
It didn't help me with Advanced luns, but right now their chief developer is analyzing whats wrong with my setup and trying to update their software.
Try it - it may work in your case.

[IG-88]

On 1/22/2022 at 12:09 AM, trian said:

Since I'm not going for a new Synology again, I would highly appreciate some instructions on how to use XPenology in order to access my VMs (vmdk, vmx, etc)?

you could use a vm on windows (like virtualbox as base) or setup a old hardware with a loader from a usb flash drive and a empty disk

https://xpenology.com/forum/topic/4044-installing-or-upgrading-to-xpenology-52-or-later/

https://xpenology.com/forum/topic/7848-links-to-loaders/

 

you can set up the same version of dsm with the loader you had before and if thats working with the test disk you would use that loader with your original disks and "migrate" to that version of that loader (3615) volumes and iscsi should work tah was as before

i guess newer versions of dsm like 6.0/6.1/6.2 will also be able to read the data but going with the same version you had before might be the safest to start with, if that gives you trouble you can still do the same (usb loader and empty test disk) with newer versions of dsm, i would start with 5.2 and then use 6.0 and go up, there are howtos in the tutorial section and the link with the loaders covers all version up to 6.2.3

practice with a usb flash drive and a single disk until you understand the process and master to setup a running system, you can also watch a few youtube videos about setting xpenology (in different versions, jun's loader from 1.01 for 6.0 and higher are more or less the same on how to set them up and the most important thing is to enter the usb vid/pid of the usb flash driver properly into grub.cfg, mac and serail are of no importance in your case, just leave the defaults as is)

 

also what do you learn from this? be prepared (have a plan for recovery) and have a backup?

[Johno2518]

On 1/28/2022 at 7:35 AM, AntonV said:

I had similar issue with having SCSI LUNs in Synology's proprietary ADVANCED format.
I had my RAID1 broken. I restored it manually, but before tried to extract data.
The only tool I found which says it can deal with Synology LUNs is Reclaime and Reclaime Pro.
It didn't help me with Advanced luns, but right now their chief developer is analyzing whats wrong with my setup and trying to update their software.
Try it - it may work in your case.

Yeah I started this conversation with them in 2019 for which they did develop something but it didn't help. I've recently contacted them again to see if their latest version helps and so far it's still not looking promising. It would be nice to know what all the files do for advanced LUN's in version 6.1 do exactly. All I know is EP_DAT files contain the actual data and the cluster file under LUN->{GUID}->clusterfile_00000 contains details of how to chery pick clusters from the EP_DAT files.

 

I have no idea what the EP_BUF, EP_TBL, EP_FRI and EP_ROD files contain.