NAS - External Network Attached Storage Repair and Data Recovery

Although, at the first sight the network external drive or network RAID-storage works on the same principle as a regular USB or FireWire external drive/RAID connected to computer with shared access on the network, but under the hood they are implemented very differently.

An external storage with network capability (NAS drive) works as a regular computer connected to you local network with shared resources. Technically, you can consider NAS server as a self-containing computer with its own booting operating system, it has the same network protocols, access rules, login information, and other net-features as the regular computer on the network.

NAS device can be with a single hard drive inside, or an array of a few hard drives - NAS RAID. Technically, NAS RAID is not just a RAID in the ordinary sense, because it is an array of data partitions on the array of hard drives.
Data recovery process from NAS drives has its similarity with data recovery from the standard hard drives; however, it very much differs on the software recovery level. The special techniques
are required to be applied, to retrieve the user’s data from damaged NAS drives, since the actual data might be encrypted by default with manufacturer's algorithm integrated in NAS chipset.

For example, RAID-based NAS external hard drives like Fantom Drive's G-Force Megadisks, Iomega, Synology, NeBuffalo TeraStation, and others carrying two or more hard drives, organized in one of RAID structure. Most used data structure on NAS drives are RAID0, RAID5. The others use JBOD, RAID10, RAID1, or just simple disk set. NAS storage may contain factory default disk array configuration or user-defined data organization type.
Data partitions can also be formatted by user’s choice. Most used formats are FAT32, NTFS,
NTFS5 for MS Windows; Linux with Ext2, Ext3, Reiser, and XFS format; Unix, BSD, Sun Solaris with UFS, UFS2 (FFS), and little-endian UFS; Novell Netware with NWFS volumes; and Apple Mac OS with HPS, HPS+ and HFSX format.

If you remove the hard drives from NAS device and start viewing each hard drive on the low
level of physical access, likely, you will see several partitions on each drive. First one or two small partitions are for the service purposes and provide all firmware-related software, plus its own operating system. The firmware code on those partitions serves only to boot the NAS Server and supply the interface functions for the network administrator. An extra partition can be also presented on the drive with the swap file for internal NAS OS on it. The next partition is the
user’s data partition; it’s normally separated from the end of drive by another padding partition.

If NAS drive becomes inaccessible due to data corruption only, the software level of NAS recovery doesn't give any problems. The reality is that when it comes to data recovery, not all hard drives in NAS RAID are fully functional and require a disk repair. RAID1 & RAID5 could be recovered even in the cases with only one damaged hard drive. In other cases, when disks are physically damaged due to mechanic or any other natural failures, we have to deal with all associated problems following with data retrieval from the magnetic disk platters.

Data-R-US is one of the specialized data recovery laboratories with highly qualified data recovery personnel, armed with the latest high-tech instruments for the data rescuing from all types of hard drive and sure enough, from NAS RAID systems.

Normally, we can recover data from NAS device without knowing all details such as, network configuration, user login, RAID type, or file system, unless the storage has used the encryption mechanism to protect user's data. But, needless to say if you can give us any hints about your network and array of disks configuration - that would be a big plus to make easy the whole data recovery process for our specialists.

If you connect the suspicious drive to other computer and still cannot access the data:

Under no circumstances should you continue using the device as you may cause further damage to the unit. Also, you should not allow the system to run a repair utility on the drive (such as Scandisk / Chkdsk / Norton etc) - this can often render yet recoverable data to its permanent loss.

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