restore / recover nanoboot harddrives

[ipanini]

Hi,

 

I have inadvertently damaged my nanoboot usb drive. This usb nanoboot stick has been functioning for years now without any problems.

I have a couple of harddrives attached and due to the age I don't have all the setup details anymore.

While I was trying to create a new xpenology machine, I believe the DSM web assistant has connected to my nanoboot server, and inadvertently damadged / wrote to my nanoboot server.

Since then it won't boot anymore. Boot ends with "Diskstation login:" cursor, and the synology webassistant finds my old nanoboot server as a DS3612xs migratable machine.

 

I guess that information has been written to the bootsector of either the usb stick or to the harddrives.

 

Preferably I would like to just restore my nanoboot server.
If this shows impossible, I would like to try to recover the contents of the hard drives.

 

I have already tried the following:

- made a new nanoboot usb stick and tried to boot ->> this does not work (Diskstation login prompt)

- boot with a ubuntu stick (version 12.10 I had lying around on a CD) ->> could not mount the hard drives, the volumes show as raid, ext4, but I was unable to mount them

 

During boot process:

- eth0 not running

- eth1 not running

 

So I'm not sure up to what point my installation has been damaged.

 

What can you advise?

Thanks for helping out!

 

Edited January 1, 2018 by ipanini
additional info

[sbv3000]

If your system is showing as 'migratable' then I think your boot loader is ok. I would follow the migration process (choose the 'migrate settings' option) and just re-install the same version of DSM 4.x that matches the nanoboot loader.

You should investigate upgrading to XPE5.2/DSM5.2 and then to XPE6/DSM6.

[ipanini]

Hi, thanks for replying;

In the meantime I have succeeded in attaching the 2 hard drives to a temporary ubuntu server, so I'm safe for now.
I'm looking into solutions to set up a backup mirror.

Any pointers to this kind of solution?

[sbv3000]

Thats good, I would see if you can take a backup of the critical data from the mounted drives.

If you have a spare drive then I would setup a 6.x test installation on your current hardware, if that all works ok then look into upgrading. DSM 6 has option to backup to various cloud services (Cloud Sync), Amazon, Google, Hubic etc, so that could work as your 'backup mirror'. Another option could be a second XPE server using cheap hardware or just a USB drive attached. It all depends on what you want to have as a backup solution. In my case I backup my critical data to another XPE machine and also to Amazon so I have an 'offsite' copy 

[Falcon30]

Synology has published a FAQ how to mount drives with Ubuntu to recover the data: 

How can I recover data from my DiskStation using a PC?

 

Falcon30