I'm dealing with a frustrating situation with my old QNAP TS-412 (using MDADM for RAID). I had two 3TB WD RedPlus drives set up in a RAID1 mirror (sda and sdd). I decided to upgrade by adding two more identical disks, which I formatted and then migrated to a RAID5 setup. This part went smoothly. However, when I added the third disk and tried to migrate to RAID6, things went south. It failed with I/O errors, and now my device is stuck in a self-recovery loop, and the only way I can access it is through a slow SSH connection since the web app is unresponsive.
The mdstat output is confusing, showing two different RAID configurations that shouldn't normally occur with a single array:
RAID6 shows sdc3[3] and sda3[0], while RAID5 includes sdd3[3] and sdb3[1]. So it appears that the original RAID1 setup transitioned to RAID5 successfully before the failure happened during the conversion to RAID6.
My main question is: Can I remove these drives from the QNAP and mount them on my Debian machine to manually rebuild the RAID5? Any expert advice or resources you could share would be greatly appreciated!
2 Answers
That output from mdstat looks pretty jumbled. But I went through a similar controller failure before, and it was a mess. First, keep a detailed log of what’s happening with each HDD. Sometimes just documenting can reveal the best next steps. You might consider starting a spreadsheet to track the state of each hard drive as you proceed with recovery. This could make it clearer what steps to take next. Here’s a link to my recovery story for reference: [link] (insert a relevant resource).
I also have an old TS412 setup. Since it's software RAID, you should be able to take those disks, connect them to your Debian machine, and try assembling the RAID. Just make sure you have mdadm installed, and run `mdadm --assemble --scan`. If you’re not too familiar with RAID in Debian, I can help point you in the right direction for getting started. My TS412 runs on Debian, and it's significantly more reliable than the default QNAP OS!
I’d definitely appreciate any guidance on loading Debian onto it. I'm new to RAID on Debian, so I want to avoid making any destructive mistakes.