TS-219P - Have I bricked my HDD's?

[michaelv976]

First the formalities...

• Qnap TS-219P
• Firmware version and Build Number Unable to establish as it won't appear in Finder, however I believe I recently updated to the same build as 469P which is 4.3.3-20170901
• Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64Bit
• OS Language - English
• Number of HDDs - 2
• HDD model - Western Digital Red WD30EFRX
• HDD capacity - 3.0TB
• RAID configuration - I believe the two bays were set up in a mirror configuration
• Services enabled, e.g. Download Station, DDNS, FTP, NFS - can no longer establish as cannot access the device
• External devices, e.g. USB printer, e-SATA drive - unknown, nothing was/is connected to the device other than an Ethernet cable
• NAS connection speed/ MTU (found in Network Settings>TCP/IP page)

- unknown

I have had a 219P for many years and eventually upgraded to a 469 Pro. After also upgrading the HDD's to 3.0TB WD Reds (WD30EFRX) I passed the 219P on to my parents and copied all their digital photos from their various lap tops and thumb drives onto the bays. It sat there on their network doing very little for some time. I ended up also hooking up my 469 to their network and together both were operational over the internet.

Perhaps a year ago they upgraded their internet and had installers come out to change over the ADSL modem to the (Australia's) 'National Broadband Network'. The installers decided to just disconnect the devices and leave them sitting in a box. So recently I tried hooking them both back up and struggled to see the devices over the LAN. So I hooked up an Ethernet hub directly to my PC. I managed to see both devices briefly but not necessarily at the same time, using QFinder etc.

Out of frustration in trying to view the contents through the 'Çomputer' portion of Explorer, I think I accidentally clicked on Configure when viewing the 219P through FInder, which I subsequently realised was a faux pas. Turning it on now it just goes to the flashing red/green light and does not appear in QFinder. I tried plugging each bay individually into an external HDD enclosure to see if I could just read the data off onto another spare drive then start from scratch again, but they cannot be read. They show up in Explorer as about 4 different virtual bays and all say they need to be formatted. This is probably obvious why to many of you but not to me.

Anyway I'm trying to figure out where to start in terms of things to try in order to recover any photos and videos on there.

Thanks in advance and apologies that I don't have much information available.

PS - I don't recall there being any stringent warnings about wiping the content of the drives by clicking on Configure (someone may be able to clarify because it's too late to check now). At best it may have said the process cannot be undone but I'm pretty sure it didn't say the contents would be cleared (because I'm stupid but don't believe I'm that stupid!). If so then there should be more fail safes or greater clarity associated with that button.

Michael

[Wheeljack77]

Hi there,

I have a TS-228 and am experiencing nearly the same problems as you. My recent firmware update failed and I have now basically a defunct bricked unit which is unresponsive.
I haven't sent a ticket to QNAP support yet but will do later to resolve this.

I have however managed to get access to my files (thankfully). I found a program called ReclaiMe and used the File Recovery version of the software to recover my data. They have a trial edition you can try which reads the data in a non-destructive manner. They also have a RAID edition of the software but I didn't need it. If yours is a 2-bay unit (219P) I suggest you try out the software. Using a 2-bay USB3 dock, connect the drives to it and run the software on a Windows PC with lots of memory and speed - pref over 16GB and has USB 3.0. It will auto detect and start to see what drives are available and then, select under the Linux-md section, the RAID set with the biggest amount of space (5TB+ on your setup). Click on that then the Start and it will try to find the files for you. Let it run (will take a while). Once that is done and it finds the files, simply select the folders you want and then click the down arrow next to Save to select to save your data to a local connected hard drive (preferably 6TB size, or whichever size is equal to your RAID data), including the full Public folder if you wish. The program I got is the Ultimate version. It cost US$199 but is worth it.

[dolbyman]

backups would have been cheaper...and that program will only work on old cat1 units such as yours

[Phantomfixer]

First the formalities...

• Qnap TS-219P
• Firmware version and Build Number Unable to establish as it won't appear in Finder, however I believe I recently updated to the same build as 469P which is 4.3.3-20170901
• Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64Bit
• OS Language - English
• Number of HDDs - 2
• HDD model - Western Digital Red WD30EFRX
• HDD capacity - 3.0TB
• RAID configuration - I believe the two bays were set up in a mirror configuration
• Services enabled, e.g. Download Station, DDNS, FTP, NFS - can no longer establish as cannot access the device
• External devices, e.g. USB printer, e-SATA drive - unknown, nothing was/is connected to the device other than an Ethernet cable
• NAS connection speed/ MTU (found in Network Settings>TCP/IP page)

- unknown

I have had a 219P for many years and eventually upgraded to a 469 Pro. After also upgrading the HDD's to 3.0TB WD Reds (WD30EFRX) I passed the 219P on to my parents and copied all their digital photos from their various lap tops and thumb drives onto the bays. It sat there on their network doing very little for some time. I ended up also hooking up my 469 to their network and together both were operational over the internet.

Perhaps a year ago they upgraded their internet and had installers come out to change over the ADSL modem to the (Australia's) 'National Broadband Network'. The installers decided to just disconnect the devices and leave them sitting in a box. So recently I tried hooking them both back up and struggled to see the devices over the LAN. So I hooked up an Ethernet hub directly to my PC. I managed to see both devices briefly but not necessarily at the same time, using QFinder etc.

Out of frustration in trying to view the contents through the 'Çomputer' portion of Explorer, I think I accidentally clicked on Configure when viewing the 219P through FInder, which I subsequently realised was a faux pas. Turning it on now it just goes to the flashing red/green light and does not appear in QFinder. I tried plugging each bay individually into an external HDD enclosure to see if I could just read the data off onto another spare drive then start from scratch again, but they cannot be read. They show up in Explorer as about 4 different virtual bays and all say they need to be formatted. This is probably obvious why to many of you but not to me.

Anyway I'm trying to figure out where to start in terms of things to try in order to recover any photos and videos on there.

Thanks in advance and apologies that I don't have much information available.

PS - I don't recall there being any stringent warnings about wiping the content of the drives by clicking on Configure (someone may be able to clarify because it's too late to check now). At best it may have said the process cannot be undone but I'm pretty sure it didn't say the contents would be cleared (because I'm stupid but don't believe I'm that stupid!). If so then there should be more fail safes or greater clarity associated with that button.

Michael

Hi Michael,
I don't think you have bricked your drives, I see your post was a while ago so maybe you have resolved the situation now? However if you have not, I think what the problem is, when you are trying to view the drives in a caddie connected to the Windows machine you will be looking at drives that are formatted under the Linux file system. If you connect these drives to a Windows machine it will not recognise the file structure and just say that they need formatting (under the Windows file structure).
When you are looking at Drives / Volumes when on a network under normal conditions, your looking at them through a Linux OS Qnap connected via network.

Is the 469 still running? If it is place the drives in a caddie and plug them into the USB port on that. Because qnap Linux OS should see the disc. ( remember when you plug a Windows NTFS drive into a USB socket on a Qnap it tells you to format the drive, that's because its formatting the drive under Linux, which is sort of the reverse of your situation now).

Alternatively what I would try is either finding someone running a Linux computer, much more popular than you think nowadays and look at the drives via a caddie on that, or could install a virtual machine on your Windows PC run Linux on that. Some other options would be PC recovery disk.
The way a lot of PC bootable recovery discs work is, you boot from the disc, that opens a temp partition on your Windows machine and runs Linux OS from the disc with lot of utilities on board.

Whatever you do, don't format the drives under Windows or you will loose your data!