Lost 96TB ARECA RAID >> HELP - Possible to recreate Virtual Volumes?

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speedheathenULTRA

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Aug 7, 2021
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Hey everyone,

Hoping someone may be able to provide some guidance here as I am in uncharted territory.

I recently accidentally broke a Virtual Volume running on an ARECA 1882IX-12 and as a result I am no longer able to access it (obviously) as well as the other two volumes that existed. I have been reading what I can find and it appears that it is possible to re-create virtual volumes, but the process is above my pay-grade and I'm afraid to do anything for fear I pass a point of no return.

These are the basic details, if anyone can chime in I can provide additional information that may be pertinent.

MacOS BigSur
ARECA 1882IX-12
MRAID Config Util
8x12TB Hitachi NAS Spinners
1x Volume (APFS)
1x Volume (NTFS)
1x Volume (NTFS)

I have already emailed ARECA, but have not yet heard back. Just to be clear, this is a catastrophic failure as in -- I have no backup. I was using one of the NTFS volumes to replicate from the APFS drive with the second NTFS volume as a sandbox.

I will also say, I am willing to either pay a member for assistance or if that is frowned upon would be happy to make a donation to the board as a gesture of my thanks.

Much appreciated.
 
I know a thing or two about messing up disk arrays, but less about fixing them ;) I think you're going to find this to be an expensive mistake to fix, both in time, and potentially in dollars; but given that you seem to be careful, you have a fighting chance. :)

I don't really understand your description of the setup, but I'm also not familiar with virtual volumes (and didn't get anywhere on a search; it was talking about VMware stuff, but you're running MacOS, so I'm confused). I also don't understand how you replicate from APFS to NTFS, but then I didn't know Apple had a filesystem replication tool either? Anyway, all that to say, I'm not qualified to fix your actual problem, but maybe more descriptive words might help someone else. It sounds like you did something bad with software and borked the thing, but there was no hardware fault (which is usually what people are trying to repair)

The only way to safely experiment on this is to make one to one copies of your disks; remove one at a time to copy to a new disk on a second computer without hardware raid, then place the original back in your current computer and the copy in a third computer with a new 1882IX-12 (match firmware versions with your current one if possible). Go nuts on the third computer and see if you can get your volumes back online. Alternately, if you're lucky, it's possible to read the proprietary raid volumes with standard software; you could check that after you copied the data. Something goes wrong with hardware raid and is hard to debug/eats the data was one of my biggest fears when I had to manage important data, and I'd avoid hardware raid if at all possible, and if not, try to run it in JBOD mode.

Good luck!
 
The first question is what exactly happened and what do you see? if you login to the card via Ethernet, do you see the original RAIDset and Volumeset? Does it show just 8 free drives? Have you done ANYTHING to the drives since losing access? Do you have 8 spare 12TB drives you can use to make bit perfect images of the existing drives so we can always go back to the beginning if something doesn't work. Do you have the original geometry of your RAIDsets (Raid Level(s), Stripe Size, Volume Block Size, Array Order) saved somewhere? How did you know something went wrong? Did the disks just disappear from the desktop, and did it happen after a reboot or program installation? Can you see anything in Disk Utility? Can you please post the COMPLETE log from the card here?
 
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