QNAP Data Recovery

We were doing some experiments with our QNAP TS-639: pulled off six drives storing several real shares total capacity of 7.5 TB, inserted new blank drives and created a new RAID5 over them, made new test shares, loaded the data to them, and turned off the system.

When we put the old disks (with real shares) to the corresponding bays and turned on the unit, the system has booted without a problem but…our Windows 7 PC could no longer see the NAS.

QFinder 6.2.0.0726 saw the NAS and reported that the QNAP had an IP address. More than that, all the shares were available in the Control panel of QFinder.

 

Went to the General setting in QFinder and everything looked good in there:

Tried to map a network drive as described here and got the following:

"Network failure: the device was not found on the network. Please check the device status."

In Windows Network we had the following:

Clicked the NAS from the Storage section and got the browser opened where we could open the Control Panel and saw the shares meaning that all the data was there but Windows refused to see the QNAP over the network.

Checked permissions on the shared folders and saw that they were OK and everyone had a full access.

Then searched the web for a solution on "cannot access QNAP over the network, Windows doesn't see QNAP" problem.

1.  Removed and then found the Network adapter as descried at https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/17c9ea7d-52df-4ef9-95fa-0a961d11bfa3/fix-for-cannot-access-nas-drives-sharefolder-is-not-accessible-or-error-code-0x80070035?forum=w8itpronetworking - did not help.
2. Checked the Local security policies as described at https://superuser.com/questions/290168/cant-reach-qnap-nas-from-windows-7 and at https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/68ffbe2a-09a7-4e29-859c-ca1aaf75dcd1/windows-7-cant-access-share-in-a-workgroup?forum=w7itpronetworking - did not help
3. Checked that the PC and the QNAP belonged to the same work group as described at https://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?t=65230 – did not help.
4. Turned off the Firewall as recommended at https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/17c9ea7d-52df-4ef9-95fa-0a961d11bfa3/fix-for-cannot-access-nas-drives-sharefolder-is-not-accessible-or-error-code-0x80070035?forum=w8itpronetworking– did not help.
5. Tried a solution with DNS – checked ipconfig/all and then flushdns as described at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=724069 and https://support.purevpn.com/dns-on-qnap – did not help.
   
6.  Added Windows credentials, advice from this forum - https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1254404-w10-build-10061-cannot-connect-to-network-share/. Did not help. 
7. Mapping a network drive in Windows gave the error:

 

Spending several days trying to solve the issue we finally have decided to stop troubleshooting and proceed with data recovery: extract the data from the disks, zero them, make a new setup, and then copy the data back to the newly created shares.

The task seemed not that difficult with a blank 8TB disk which we has recently purchased. More than that, we were so excited to do all the work for a real case as we usually describe on our NAS recovery tutorials.

1. Pull the disks out of the NAS.
2. Connect them to a PC, preferably via SATA ports on the motherboard. We have only five free ports and therefore need to use two additional ports - one for the QNAP disk and one for a 8 TB to which we are planning to save the recovered data. We take them from a LSI RAID controller card.
3. Launch ReclaiMe and see a typical QNAP layout - too many small partitions on every NAS disk.
4. See all the share folders and start copying data. After less than a day or so get all the data copied and checked.
5. Zero the original disks with Lowvel.
6. Make a new setup in QNAP
7. Copy the data from the disk to the newly created QNAP shares.

Spent 4 days for data recovery and got all the shares accessible.