Legacy Network Products

[iainhu]

Well I have just invested in a Syology box. This came with very good reviews and recommendations in various magazines. It's purely a case and controller and you buy uour own disks and this is a twin disk unit, so I've bounght 2x 2Tb disks, set them up as RAID 1 (mirrored data so both are a copy of each other...one disk goes bad and you can take out and replace the failed disk and it will all rebuild itself).

So far so good. Seems to work nicely and the management interface via a browser is a lot nicer than the old Maxstor UI. The box also seems to be capable of a lot more. More fiddling and setup to do, but so far so good and I have the NAS working and even nicely partitioned so different users can only access different bits, e.g. the kids do not have access to parent's stuff!

It's now down to taking the old 500Mb unit to pieces and seeing if I can salvage anything from that. The 'new power supply' solution hasn't worked for me and nor have the 'power up with no network connection'. Having got the thing into pieces I'm sure the 'jump start the disks off a separate 5v power supply' solution also won't work as the disk spins up. I've also tried the 'couple of hours in the freezer' solution and that didn't work either!

I am suspecting the disk is good and see it's a Barracuda 7200 unit...quite a nice drive in fact. I can see it beoming a secondary HDD in a desktop PC, and maybe on the way I'll recover some data. I suspect though that it'll need to be the Ext2 IFS solution, but we wait to see if that'll work!

[Linton9]

Gday,

I have the same drive MSSII 1TB...

Its in span mode, so I have 1TB of space and I'm trying to copy all the data off so I can retire this drive.

The problem I'm having is it seems some files cannot be read after a certain point.

Windows 7 returns the error 'invalid file handle'

Windows Commander (under win7) can't write to the destination drive (which seems like an odd error)

OSX asks for a username and password and then says I dont have permission to access the file.

The power LED is doing the green-orange sequence.

I've removed all user accounts...

I can still see all my files, but I just can't copy them from the drive.

How can I retrieve my data?
Are some of these files spanned between discs? If so will I be able to retrieve these spanned files if I physically remove the disks and mount under linux? 

Thanks for your help.

[AskTheLeaf]

The Maxtor Shared Storage II isn't supported with Windows 7.

Do you have another computer that has an older operating system installed on it, such as Windows XP? If so, do you receive the same error message?

[gibran.samuel]

I have a Maxtor Shared Storage II 500 GB with very similar issue.

The drive was working fine until I turned it off.

Ok! so this is what I was getting

1) Green blinking power light when I turn the drive on drive. Occasionally it will throw in an amber light for fun. 

2) The drive will not respond to reset and power button. You will get an amber light if you hold it long enough but it won’t do what it is supposed to.

3) The Network light works fine, when you unplug and plug the device.

4) The dive light comes up green and blinks occasionally also just to make your life a little exiting.

Ok! so this is what I think is going on with the drive.

The power supply is lemon. It just goes weak over time. It can sustain the power to keep the drive up but not boot the system. So when you turn the device on it does not get enough juice to properly boot the full system. I have seen this same issue in desktops with a bad power supply.

Ok! so this is what I did to determine the supply is bad.

I took the bad power supply and plugged it in another Maxtor Plus that also came with the same supply. The drive got power but never properly turned on - similarly to the issue I was having with Maxtor II. Then I used the good supply from Maxtor Plus and plugged it in my Maxtor II and everything came back up. In the troubleshooting process I have reset the drive many times but that never happened therefore I suppose the buttons were not working. 

The fact that Maxtor does not provide any input on this issue makes them look very, very, very bad.

Keep trying until your brain starts frying. 

Good luck,

GS

[Mel0en]

Same issue here and it seems to be fixed now. Before you try one of my solutions, please be aware that these are at your own risk and the possibility exists that your MSSII will get fried and/or damaged and/or waranty can be void. I've recovered data from the drives several times in several ways, so I can take a risk. If you don't know what you're doing or don't know how to recover data from linux-formatted disks please stop reading.

Anyway, ever since I got my MSS I've had problems. The device needed resets (hard and soft) frequently and I've already needed to replace the power adapter in the past. Since a few days the blinking issue occured again, the device doesn't finish it's boot procedure fully and resets itself. I've tried replacing the power adapter witth two 12V/3A adapters, both didn't work. I took a wild guess and tried a universal power adapter (15V) and the device booted up and is running again! I'm not sure how much damage the 15V will do to the device, but I'll see. I will look for a replacement adapter in a few days.

On my road to solution I've ran into the follwing possible solutions:

- Replace power adapter (12V/5A or 15V at your own risk)

- "Now after several trials, i opened the box, removed the disk package, and got to the board. there's a little batterie which i removed for like 3 minutes, then put it back in. put the disk package back in place and .... BINGO ... it booted nicely."

- Swap SATA connectors: http://www.suphammer.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1078&p=5174&hilit=factory+reset#p5174

The suphammer site was previously known as http://www.openmss.org/ , a very good source of information on our devices. Unfortunately, things got a little quiet over there. Hopefully my posts helps other users who have issues with their MSSII, I know how it feels to losse all your precious data. My advice is to always use the MSSII in RAID1 config, always backup files and if the device gets broken, an IT guy with experience in recovering Linux data is highly likely to be able to recover your data.