Suggestion needed to copy contents out from unionfs'ed drives when mobo has died

saimer · 2. September 2020

Hi,

I had installed omv 4 on an old PC with 5 SATA drives. I enabled the unionfilesystem plug-in and setup all 5 drives into the pool. The PC was used mainly for BT and media storage. A few days ago the PC just died. After some diagnostic, it looks like the motherboard had died. It's an old ASUS conroe 965 with Intel E4400 (C2D). I have no intention to fix it or upgrade this old PC. Is there a way to get the contents out from the hard drives? I have another Dell PC that has only 4x onboard SATA ports, and a USB HDD enclosure that can plug 4 drives in. There are some important course videos (without backup) that I really want to recover. Any suggestion is greatly appreciated!

Saimer

tenzen · 2. September 2020

If only your motherboard died, then the disks will work on another pc as independent disks without an issue. Simply plug them in, mount them and move the data somewhere. When you have finished merging the contents of all 5 disks into a single tree, you'll be good to go.

If your other PC is windows, you'll need to either use a tool to mount the linux filesystem (maybe ext4?) or use a live usb to mount them.

saimer · 2. September 2020

Thank you tenzen! Yes all my other PCs / laptops are windows. I'll try to find the mounting tool!

cabrio_leo · 3. September 2020

Buy another motherboard with at least 5 SATA ports and connect all of your devices. Your old OMV installation should boot without a problem. Probably you have to update the LAN card settings with omv-firstaid.

tenzen · 3. September 2020

Zitat von saimer

I'll try to find the mounting tool!

It's been years since i've had to mount ext4 on windows (my main laptop and portable laptop are linux based), but I have done it in the past successfully.. search for "mount ext4 on windows" and you'll find lots of threads and discussions.. like this one: https://superuser.com/question…xt4-partitions-on-windows

Another option that might make more sense for you.. Load up virtualbox on your windows box and connect the raw disks, boot it like cabrio_leo suggested. Then you dont need any odd windows tools, nor do you need to worry about manually merging data on your unionfs.. Boot it up and move the data off.

saimer · 4. September 2020

I tried disinternals Linux Reader and it worked just great!

Since I have an enclosure to connect 4 drives at a time to check which one has data and it turned out that 1 drive has no data stored at all. I was able to navigating through all folders and copy all contents to an external drive - I happen to have one 8TB drive not used hanging around. So all solved! Thanks again for your suggestions!

saimer

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