I am attempting to recover some data from a RAID-5 NAS enclosure on my PC. A number of things were already done wrong, but I am hopeful to recover at least some of the data from the array. The array was created on a Synology NAS enclosure consisting of 4 x 3TB drives in a RAID-5 configuration. I gather everything was working well until a power surge or brownout which caused one drive to die completely (disk #0) and was likely the cause of some read errors on the other disks. When the owner of the array noticed the disk failure, the wrong disk was replaced to cause a rebuild! Disk #2 was replaced instead of disk #0, so the NAS would never have succeeded at a rebuild operation. At this point my friend came to me for assistance and I began pulling the drives from the NAS into my PC running Ubuntu 14.04 (amd64) to attempt to restore at least some of the files. I cannot get disk #0 to spin at all. Disk #1 and disk #3 appear to automatically assemble into the array in the correct slots. Disk #2 appears to mdadm as "disk #32770". Here is the output of `mdadm --examine` on each of the RAID partitions, and the contents of /proc/mdstat when the drives are spun up inside my PC: /dev/sdb5: Magic : a92b4efc Version : 1.2 Feature Map : 0x0 Array UUID : d06e7cf6:05704b33:ea53fc30:0c087b55 Name : DiskStation:2 Creation Time : Thu Apr 3 13:41:58 2014 Raid Level : raid5 Raid Devices : 4 Avail Dev Size : 5851063680 (2790.00 GiB 2995.74 GB) Array Size : 8776594944 (8370.01 GiB 8987.23 GB) Used Dev Size : 5851063296 (2790.00 GiB 2995.74 GB) Data Offset : 2048 sectors Super Offset : 8 sectors State : clean Device UUID : 46277a0d:f75e3612:911d4e5f:50b46678 Update Time : Fri May 29 08:20:37 2015 Checksum : cd5c1a5f - correct Events : 1908912 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K Device Role : Active device 32770 Array State : .A.A ('A' == active, '.' == missing) /dev/sdc5: Magic : a92b4efc Version : 1.2 Feature Map : 0x0 Array UUID : d06e7cf6:05704b33:ea53fc30:0c087b55 Name : DiskStation:2 Creation Time : Thu Apr 3 13:41:58 2014 Raid Level : raid5 Raid Devices : 4 Avail Dev Size : 5851063680 (2790.00 GiB 2995.74 GB) Array Size : 8776594944 (8370.01 GiB 8987.23 GB) Used Dev Size : 5851063296 (2790.00 GiB 2995.74 GB) Data Offset : 2048 sectors Super Offset : 8 sectors State : clean Device UUID : fa5bf9cd:629d2a75:7e3d9ab3:6189e4f9 Update Time : Sun May 31 11:05:20 2015 Checksum : c69bcc20 - correct Events : 1908922 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K Device Role : Active device 1 Array State : AA.A ('A' == active, '.' == missing) /dev/sdd5: Magic : a92b4efc Version : 1.2 Feature Map : 0x0 Array UUID : d06e7cf6:05704b33:ea53fc30:0c087b55 Name : DiskStation:2 Creation Time : Thu Apr 3 13:41:58 2014 Raid Level : raid5 Raid Devices : 4 Avail Dev Size : 5851063680 (2790.00 GiB 2995.74 GB) Array Size : 8776594944 (8370.01 GiB 8987.23 GB) Used Dev Size : 5851063296 (2790.00 GiB 2995.74 GB) Data Offset : 2048 sectors Super Offset : 8 sectors State : clean Device UUID : 0da09e5b:b3557017:dec76908:02543203 Update Time : Sun May 31 11:05:20 2015 Checksum : 54a41d85 - correct Events : 1908922 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K Device Role : Active device 3 Array State : AA.A ('A' == active, '.' == missing) /proc/mdstat: Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md2 : inactive sdb5[2](S) sdc5[1](S) sdd5[3](S) 8776595520 blocks super 1.2 I've read a bunch of forum posts and articles detailing a number of techniques to try and recover some of the data. I gather from these Synology instructions that once the array is assembled I must use `vgchange` to register a Volume Group: https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/faq/579 This wiki page gave me the idea of using `mdadm --create --assume-clean ...` to bring the array to a state where I might be able to see some of its contents: https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID_Recovery I'm also familiar with concerns over using large disks in a RAID-5 configuration and would like to be clear that this was not my idea and I am simply trying to help a friend retrieve at least some of the files from the array - I do not expect complete recovery will be possible: http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/ I attempted to bring this array up with this command: mdadm --create --assume-clean --level=5 --raid-devices=4 --chunk=64 /dev/md2 missing /dev/sdc5 /dev/sdb5 /dev/sdd5 This appeared to bring up a new array with 0 Events. I've restored my backups and can try again from the best state I have to work with. All disks experienced some read errors while creating the backups, and I realize complete recovery will be impossible, but if I could retrieve any data we would be pleased with that. Any help greatly appreciated. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html