It's Crashed, It's Crashed

[t0m541]

Hi everyone.
I've had a NAS for years, it's a custom thing, built in a converted ATX case using a micro ATX board, AMD cpu, 16gb ram.
It has 4 drives in it with 9Tb capacity.
I have no idea what model it is as my late brother originally set it up as he was a computer software wizard, but he did say that it was one of the top end systems, probably 12 drives.
Anyway, it lives in a space where it can be just left alone and as such it's designed to have almost no physical interaction, 5 days of UPS supply to keep it running if needed.
Last weekend I had new broadband installed and as such all the network addresses changed and I found I couldn't access the server.
I discovered that the NAS had crashed, so I brought it in and tried accessing it with a direct link via ethernet cable from my laptop using web assistant.
Web assistant couldn't find any attached systems.
I also plugged in a monitor and keyboard/mouse into the NAS to see what was going on.
It would boot and run a full bios check, memory ok etc, but as it checked the drives, drive 4 sometimes would be missing, so I tried booting without number 4.
Occasionally it would get to, checking system volume ... update successful, but then go no further.
At no time could I get any connection through the network ports, either the one built into the MB or the network card in PCi slot.
I did try installing a new version of the software onto a spare HDD, the web assistant did see that through the network but then didn't.
My thinking is that there is an issue with the MB somewhere, I have stripped and re-plugged everything back in in case it had a dry connection.
The bios reports that the system is ok.
I've now bought another MB/memory/CPU bundle and a bunch of new HDD's with new cables.
My intention is to build the system with the new kit and see if it boots and whether web assistant can see it.
If so, will I be able to pull all the data from the old drives and save it to the new ones, will it be a case of plugging the old ones in, one by one and transferring it over.
The new MB has 6 SATA3 slots, 3 of which will be populated originally, so leaving 3 spare.
The original drive arrangement had 4 and the storage was set out that, for example, photos/videos on drive 1, music drive 2, files drive 3 etc as I read that if the data was spread in a raid and 1 drive was lost then file packages would mean that the data as a whole would be lost.
Anyway
Over to you guys

[IG-88]

3 hours ago, t0m541 said:

It would boot and run a full bios check, memory ok etc, but as it checked the drives, drive 4 sometimes would be missing, so I tried booting without number 4.
Occasionally it would get to, checking system volume ... update successful, but then go no further.

if you got anything usable with local monitor and keyboard then it must be a pretty old dsm installation like 5.x

the loader (usb flash drive) would tell more about it and there is usually some hint in the boot menu that comes after the bios settings

3 hours ago, t0m541 said:

The original drive arrangement had 4 and the storage was set out that, for example, photos/videos on drive 1, music drive 2, files drive 3 etc

unlikely if you have 4 drives you usually set it up in any way to have redundancy (like on drive can go missing and all will still be working)

most likely would be a raid5 setup where all data are spread over all disks including redundancy information for the case one disks fails

 

3 hours ago, t0m541 said:

as I read that if the data was spread in a raid and 1 drive was lost then file packages would mean that the data as a whole would be lost.

assuming is a problem, you need to know and until you do you should be very careful with the disks

i'd suggest you start reading about DSM and its specifics, it not just as a normal windows or linux system, there are some specialty's you need to know about before attempting any further steps, dont try to update anything, 1st step is to understand the situation and maybe even copy off all data in a safe way before "experimenting"

 

[t0m541]

Hi, thanks for replying.

when I've built the new system and installed the new clean drives in it, load up and get working  6.2 baremetal, which I have a copy of. though I do still have the original USB thumb drive my brother used to install/set up the NAS originally, would that be a better copy to use ?

Could I then plug in the old drives with my data on and copy it across onto the new drives using the web assistant.

I never made a backup of anything the NAS was the backup.