Hardware and RAID configuration

Western Digital My Book Live Duo 2x3TB drives in a RAID 1 configuration.

Problem:

The NAS went offline. After forcing the device back online, the user could not find the shared folder holding his data. He tried to recover the data using File Scavenger® but most recover files did not retain the original name and could not be opened.

Diagnosis:

• For a RAID 1 (mirrored set) either of the drive could be used for data recovery.
• The drive contained four partitions. The largest partition hosted an ext4 volume holding the user data.
• The primary superblock of the ext4 volume was lost but the Group Descriptor Table (GDT) and the backup superblocks were still intact.
• More importantly, the root folder appeared to be valid.

Solution:

• Manually computed the location and size of the ext4 volume. Created a new primary superblock.
• Fed the information to File Scavenger® and recovered the data.

Result:

Data was successfully recovered with the original filename and folder structure.