Mixed bag of stuff today. The best part is that I have recovered some data that I thought was gone, and the ReadyNAS appears to be working.

I was poking around the bat cave last night, and came across the drives that had failed several months ago that had prompted this whole NAS fiasco. I had previously managed to take the data off, then wrecked that drive. Well, I sent it to a data recovery place. One thing I didn’t know is that the files do not come back in the same folder structure. They were in folders the data recovery people had made based on file type. What a pain.

But, there didn’t appear to be any .hmk files, which is what I was trying to get. Annie had made a 50 some page cookbook with a Halmark software package that we were trying to recover.

Well, I decided, “What the heck”, and hooked up one of the old drives that had failed, and put a Ubuntu live disk in the CD, and started it up. The live CD didn’t have RAID or LVM set up, so I had to install them, but once I did, a couple of commands later, and I reassembled the mirror, but with just the one drive. It worked. I could see the backup folder. I mounted it, and copied the data off to a removable drive.

Then I pushed my luck, I tried to copy the music files off. Boom. The drive really died. Through so many errors that the file system was actually ejected by Linux. That’s OK, I can re-rip the music, but I had the backup folder!

Then I went and plugged it into Annie’s windows machine, and we looked at the files. Lots of other work she had done with .hmk files, but no big cookbook. Why it suddenly occurred to her to look in the trash, we will never know, but guess what was there? Yup, the cookbook files. Yippee! Best data recovery tip ever: look in the trash 😉

With the cookbook files safely stored on a second drive, I returned to getting the ReadyNAS working. The problem was that the NAS was claiming that the 3 drives I had in there were all dead. One was brand new. Didn’t think that was possible. So, using the same box as before, with the Ubuntu live CD, I mounted the drives, and started it up. I then removed the partitions from all three drives and saved them. They are now blank.

Then I placed them back in the ReadyNAS, and rebooted with a reset. I first tried the factory restore. This is by pressing the reset button with a paper clip while pushing the power button. I held this for 10sec to get the factory restore. I got the message that there was a firmware error. Crap. Then I tried the OS reinstall. This is the same reset, but only holding for 5 sec. This seemed to progress. I got stuck at a booting step that I was sure was incorrect, and I needed to try something else, but I stuck it out. A half hour later, I was able to connect to the ReadyNAS with a web browser. It was rebuilding the array. Only 17 hours to finish!

At this point there is another couple to go, but I won’t be able to check for several hours, but things look good.

Packing. Now I can start to get ready for my DLWS trip to Michigan on Saturday. There is lots to do. I don’t have a great packing solution for my gear. Everything won’t fit in my backpack, and the bag I have been keeping my tripod and flash gear is pretty big. I would like to be down to one bag though. We will have to see how it goes.

I need to make sure all my cards are downloaded, and my laptop is set up properly with the software I usually use on my desktop. (Photoshop, Lightroom, and a few plugins) Cords, chargers, etc. I feel like I am disorganized right now.¬† At least it is not Friday night…