We’ve been looking at an issue with a two-bay Synology NAS where the second drive has been fried and the first one seems to be on the blink. We’ve removed the first drive from the Synology and plugged it into a PC running an Ubuntu Live CD to try to recover the data.

Synology utilises a combination of mdadm and LVM to create a create a flexible partition arrangement.

Basically we want to get to the LVM Logical Volumes, and to do that we need to get to everything else!! (Hard disk -> physical partitions -> raid arrays -> LVM Volume Groups -> LVM Logical Volumes)

✅ Physical hard disk we can see /dev/sdb

✅ Physical partitions we can see /dev/sdb5

❌ raid array - not yet…

lets have a look at the software raid instance:

root@ubuntu:/dev# mdadm --examine /dev/sdb5
/dev/sdb5:
Magic : a92b4efc
Version : 1.2
Feature Map : 0x0
Array UUID : 1ec21baa:ad871faa:8775b362:fa5ab5e4
Name : DiskStation:2
Creation Time : Sat Mar 26 06:41:30 2011
Raid Level : raid1
Raid Devices : 2
 
Avail Dev Size : 5851063680 (2790.00 GiB 2995.74 GB)
Array Size : 2925531648 (2790.00 GiB 2995.74 GB)
Used Dev Size : 5851063296 (2790.00 GiB 2995.74 GB)
Data Offset : 2048 sectors
Super Offset : 8 sectors
State : clean
Device UUID : e3c4380e:05918049:c43ff76d:1b2b75c8
 
Update Time : Fri Oct 23 19:48:51 2015
Checksum : ca734edd - correct
Events : 27340
Device Role : Active device 32769
Array State : .. ('A' == active, '.' == missing)

awesome, we can see the partition, so… lets create a read only loop of the partition (stripping the RAID bit)…

losetup --find --show --read-only --offset $((2048*512)) /dev/sdb5

now we have the read only partition on /dev/loop1 lets check Physical Volumes…

root@ubuntu:~# pvdisplay
--- Physical volume ---
PV Name /dev/loop1
VG Name vg1000
PV Size 2.72 TiB / not usable 4.50 MiB
Allocatable yes (but full)
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 714240
Free PE 0
Allocated PE 714240
PV UUID 1lferB-uxUj-aBx2-w4bI-0AcY-mgog-ZyhuJa

lets check Volume Groups…

root@ubuntu:~# vgdisplay
--- Volume group ---
VG Name vg1000
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 1
Metadata Sequence No 2
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 1
Open LV 0
Max PV 0
Cur PV 1
Act PV 1
VG Size 2.72 TiB
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 714240
Alloc PE / Size 714240 / 2.72 TiB
Free PE / Size 0 / 0
VG UUID q1jgmZ-7Rg5-n6o6-Q8b4-gDfR-J3ce-1zZR6O

lets check Logical Volumes…

root@ubuntu:~# lvdisplay
--- Logical volume ---
LV Path /dev/vg1000/lv
LV Name lv
VG Name vg1000
LV UUID qQB4MX-z29D-FMF3-mICy-mn9t-WcA8-a0cs9H
LV Write Access read/write
LV Creation host, time ,
LV Status available
# open 0
LV Size 2.72 TiB
Current LE 714240
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
- currently set to 256
Block device 252:0

All looking good and now we know where the Logical Volume lives we can mount it…

mount /dev/vg1000/lv /mnt/test

job done!

Apologies for the format of this post, I’ve pulled it together from notes I made as I went along down various blind alleys when attempting to recover the data.