Iomega Hard Drive Not Responding

• Iomega External Hard Drive Drivers Windows 10
• Iomega External Hard Drive Not Responding
• Iomega Hard Drive Not Detected

By Gregory R. Bronner MS '00

IOMEGA NAS A300u, Raid5, Recovery, RaidFrame, MultipleDisk Failure, FreeBSD

Iomega hard drive 'not detected' is a common problem and we offer a data recovery service to get you data back based in the United Kingdom, Belfast NI. This Iomega external hard drive came in because the customer advised the it stopped working on his Apple iMac and MacBook. It also made some clicking sounds when plugged in via USB. Sometimes taking out the hard drive and putting it into a new enclosure is the only way. Photograph: Alamy. All hard drives fail, typically after five or more years but sometimes after a few months. Windows Stops Responding When Disconnected from the Iomega HDD External Hard Drive The Computer Does Not Recognize Multiple Partitions on the Iomega HDD External Hard Drive A Large File will not Copy to the Iomega HDD External Hard Drive For additional USB or FireWire troubleshooting, see USB Drive Troubleshooting or FireWire Drive.

Disks fail often.Most computers and laptops have no backups. When I started doing taxeselectronically, I realized that I should go out and get a more permanentstorage solution.

The IOMEGA NAS A300u

The IOMEGA NAS A300u was roughly the size of a pizza box,and sounded like a jet airplane taking off, due to the two cooling fans.Here's a picture:

It turns out that this was basically low-end PC runningFreeBSD 4.6.2 with three hard disks in a relatively heavy duty case.I suspect that they must have gotten aspecial deal on motherboards, because there's no reason to put a graphics card,a serial/parallel port, a mouse and keyboard, and two USB ports on thisotherwise.Here's a picture of theinside:

Since this thing was so loud, I pretty much only used itduring tax season, and to back up other important documents such as my mortgageclosing statements.The 10baseT Ethernetwas pretty slow.Nevertheless, I nevergot around to replacing it, as it just sat there and worked.

The IOMEGA NAS had 3 disks of 40g each. Some disk space wasconsumed as overhead, and the whole thing was put into a RAID5 configuration,so the actual effective size of the array was about 73 g.I never filled it, as the io speeds were too slow to make it useful for storingphotos and videos, and as it made so much noise that I didn't really enjoyhaving it turned on when at my desk.

Symptoms of the Failure

When I started doing my taxes, I noticed that my previousyear's tax file was corrupted.I assumedthat TurboTax was the source of the issue, but I prophylactically copied thelast year's tax documents to my main computer.

At some point, I turned the NAS on, and the front powerlight never stopped blinking, meaning that it was in a ‘booting' state.I tried cycling it a few times, and thenthought uh-oh!

The first thing that I did was google the problem.Unfortunately, this machine was neverpopular, nor was it widely distributed.Presumably most of them are in the scrap heap by now.However, the most pertinent result was thisweb page:

gfdsa vs. iomegaa300u, written by Michael Tabolsky, who was extremely helpful in the process.

There's a tremendous amount of information on this web page,but unless you are an expert, it is intimidating.

Note that my problem was different from his – I had two failed disks.

Removing the Data from the Disks

If you are reading this, you may want to contact acommercial data recovery service. Most of them appear to be scams (see below),but if your disks are, in fact failing, you want to minimize the amount ofspinning, and these services have the ability to replace the circuit boards,motors, and drive heads—these techniques are beyond the scope of thisdocument.These guys charge $1000 + perdisk for this service, so beware.

Here's what worked for me:

First, I removed the top of the IOMEGA NAS, and examined thecontent.No fires, mouse infestations,or other obvious signs of damage.Basedon Mike's pictures, I plugged my monitor in and powered it up.I observed that IDE 0 (the middle disk) hadfailed, and that the machine wouldn't come up, as it had different ‘ModCounters'.A few more power cyclesconvinced me that there wasn't anything that I could do.I noted that Drive 0 (the middle one) hadfailed.When I tried to boot from Drive2 (rhs), I got this::

Label the Drives

Each drive should be labeled with its number (I used 1/2/3),and whether it was an IDE Master or slave and which IDE cable it was connectedto.Label the circuit boards as well andseparately. I used stickers.

The Data Recovery Scam

After reading the account of how this happened, I looked forraid recovery experts in the NYC area.Most of these people seemed to spend more time on their google rankingthan on their actual service.

Given that mostpeople in this situation are willing to pay literally any amount to recover their data, a high google ranking gets thesuckers with easy problems in the door – the comments on Yelp convinced me thatthat many of these guys were aggressive kids armed with a few basic tools, butno deep technical knowledge.

Their business model seems to be to pick off theeasy-to-solve problems and to charge a very high price for their service.One guy quoted me $3000, but said it could go‘much higher' – but his interview process appeared to be designed to probe mydepth of wallet and willingness to pay, not my technical abilities.At this point, I knew that I needed to do itmyself.

Getting the Tools

Michael's solution used an old PC that happened to have IDEcables.I don't happen to have one ofthose lying around.This only works ifthe disks are reasonably good, and if you happen to have a computer that hasthe newer 80-cable 40-pin 133mhz IDE cables, whichwere pretty much obsolete by around 2005.I don't recommend it, as moving drives around is dangerous and asrebooting a PC multiple times is slow and annoying.

Magic Screwdrivers Bits

If you don't have a 100pc set of security screwdriver bits,you should get one. You'll probably need to go shopping on Amazon anyway:

Neiko 100 piece security screwdriver set

The magic screwdrivers have already paid for themselves andhave other uses beyond this project. I've used them to open up the microwaveand swap out the circuit board, and to open up certain tamper-proof intercomcomponents.

SATA- USB Converters.

I really had no idea that these existed until I saw them onAmazon.These allow you to turn an oldhard drive into a USB device.I stronglyadvise you to buy two or three, as the build quality is terrible, and you wantto avoid spinning the disk excessively because your cable failed.I bought two and used both.

Iomega External Hard Drive Drivers Windows 10

SerialATA Converter Ubuntu usb drive.

USB Pen Drive

These are basically throwaway items. You need a 2G drivecapable of running a livecd.Buy a decent quality version, as these thingsfail at alarming rates. Get two.

An Extra Hard Drive

When your hard drives are sick, you really don't want toturn them on and off a bunch of times.Having an extra hard drive to ‘practice' that can help you get thetechnique down and save wear and tear on the damaged disks.I had an old computer with a 500G hard drivethat had an unused partition of 200G

An Extra Computer connected to the Internet

You are going to use the main computer to back up the data,so you need some way to get to google toread this document!

A Practice Computer

Iomega External Hard Drive Not Responding

I used an ancient netbook to test my linuxdata copying skills and to test my pen drive linuxes– it saved me a bunch of reboot cycles.

ApproachesthatDid Not Work:

Here's a list of things that I tried when backing up thedisk that did NOT work.

Using ddrescue on VirtualBox

I have avirtualboxlinuxguest that I use for programming. I tried to use it for data capture, andworked hard to set up USB filters in virtualbox, butI could never get the machine to recognize the external hard drives, so I gaveup. I also had problems in that sometimes the filters would capture mykeyboard.My eventual conclusion wasthat while this might be possible, it wasn't worth trying to figure out.

Using the bootable pen drive image maker from SystemRescueCD .I thought my pen drives were bad, but reallythe installer was the problem.Ieventually downloaded a different installer and it worked.

Copying to my main Hard Drive

For reasons that I can't explain, when I tried backing upthe RAW image files to my main Windows 7 hard drive, when I rebooted back intowindows, Windows ate the files.This wasvery disconcerting, as one my hard drives often refused to spin up and berecognized.

Copying to a FAT32 Drive

This was just dumb.Iformatted the extra partition of my external target drive as FAT32. It doesn'twork. Make sure it is formatted as NTFS.

SysrescueCD

SystemRescueCD is a bootable linuxlivecd that has a largenumber of disk tools on it.You can bootthe computeroffthe pen drive (press F2 or F12 at boot time to change the BIOS boot order!).

I downloaded a copy of SystemRescueCDas it has a good collection of tools to recover and back up hard drives.However, the ‘installer' that they providednever worked correctly, and my pen drives would not boot when I tested them onan ancient laptop. Eventually, I got the installer from PenDriveLinux,and that did the trick.

Mounting the Recovery Drive

After booting up pen drive linux,the next step is to ensure that you can mount the target hard drive.

Plug a SATA adapter into it, and plug the USB cable into thecomputer.

First you have to go find it – in linuxit typically has a name like /dev/sda

mkdir /mnt/gooddrive

nfs3-g /path/to/drive/mnt/gooddrive

Do NOTusemount here, as itwill trash an NTFS hard drive – I was lucky, as CHKDSK managed to fix theissue.I was also lucky because I'd onlywritten 300g out of the 2TB on my main hard drive, sowhen I copied another 80G, it went to an empty spot.

Also, I recommend using an external disk.For some reason, NTFS deleted all of my diskimages when I logged back into windows. It also keeps you from accidentally destroyingyour good computer.

Write a file to the disk. (e.g. ls > /mnt/gooddrive/x).

Now reboot to windows (yank the pen drive!), mount theexternal drive and verify that you can see the file that you just wrote.

Imaging the drives.

Reboot using the pen drive.

Move the NAS next to the target computer.

Unplug all IDE cables and power cables for the hard drives.

Plug the power and cable adapters into the first drive, andensure that the drive has power.

Power up the NAS

Iomega Hard Drive Not Detected

I had the best luckwhen I powered up the drive and then plugged the USB port into thecomputer.MAKE SURE YOU GET THE ORIENTATION OF THE IDE ADAPTER RIGHT!.These thingsare so cheap that they often don't put the little ‘key' on the connector, soyou screw up quite easily.Also,depending on which adapter you use, the little cable tail may get in the way ofthe drive's power plug. Put the power plug in first and then the adapter.

Now start up your external destination drive and verify thatyou can see it in linux.

startx

gparted

Now hit ‘Rescan all drives'. You should be able to

ddrescue –d–b4096 /dev/sd2 (or whatever gpartedcalls it) /disk1.raw

Make sure you know which disk image file corresponds towhich

These commands will let you see the partition tables, theused space, and will image the drive

I was lucky – ddrescue reported noerrors. It takes about half an hour per drive.

Now repeat this two more times.

Power off the NAS. Move the adapterand power cable to the next drive, and repeat 2 more times, being careful notto overwrite existing backup files or fill up your target hard disk.

Problems Spinning up a Drive

One of my drives imaged cleanly.The other one was recalcitrant, and I had topower-cycle it a few times.

If this happens SKIPTHIS DRIVE.You need 2/3 to work.Don't waste time.

The feeling on the net is that this generally futile: attemptto fix a drive.I did not attempt tosacrifice a virgin keyboard, but I don't think it would have helped.

My third hard drive was dead.

This guy documents how he got his data off a failed harddrive here: Circuit Board Replacement

You can try this (the drives use TORX T-8 screws), but makesure that you've gotten data off of the donor hard drive first!Also, make sure that you've labeled thecircuit boards and the drives, so you know where everything goes if you dodecide to use a data recovery service.

I tried putting my dead hard drive in the freezer andchanging its circuit boards, as described above and freezertrick.

It didn't work.Thiscomplicates matters further.

Copy the image

Reboot to Windows, and copy the data from the externaldrive.Now make a backup copy ofthat.You are now done with part 1, andcan go put the NAS and cables away.Walkaway for a while – this process is slow.

Setting UpVirtualBox

This example assumes that you are working on a Windows basedcomputer.

Download and install VirtualBox, VirtualBox Guest Additions, as well as a modern linux virtual disk image and the first ISO CD image ofFreeBSD 4.2.6, available at ftp-archive.freebsd.com

Now set up three virtual computers:

·Ubuntu 12.04 (or higher) – for testing andprogramming

·FreeBSD 4.6.2 (for recovering the data)

·Blank (call it FreeBsd),you will use this to test the boot of the original NAS.

Save Your Work!

I got a bunch of Blue Screens of Death when working in VirtualBox with freebsd.YMMV. Save yourwork!

Install the VirtualBox package into Ubuntu

You will need the VBoxInteralCommandslater.Also set up mount points forcopying to the host computer (using Shared Folders)

Convert the RAW file to VDI format:

VBoxManageconvertfromrawfile.rawfile.vdi --format vdi

Wait a while. This process is slow.

Install the FreeBSD Distro.

Using virtualbox, put the CD inthe virtual CD drive, and make sure that the boot order has the CD before thehard disk.

I recommend using the general developer category.Go through the install process, but don'tinstall a lot of stuff.You Win 10 virtual machine.

Now go to the virtual CD, mount it (using mount /dev/acd0 /cdrom), and go andvisit the cdrom

Go to the src directory, and runthe install.sh – you will need the whole source tree later.

Test your internet and set up a mount for the localdrive.

I had problems with internet connectivity until I added this

/etc/resolv.conf :

nameserver192.168.2.1

Obviously, this works on my network,but not necessarily yours.

You will also need the lynx package

See what's wrong with your NAS:

Make a COPY ofyour VDI files, and attach a copy to the disks of the blank VirtualBoxguest.You should be able to boot it andsee if the disks were readable.Recordthe error and any warnings that it produces.

In my case, the reboot cycles had caused the Mod Counters todiffer, and the machine had (I think) responded by trying to reboot in RAID 1,leaving it with two conflicting RaidFrame Geometrylistings.

Note that the modcounters (-735147and -735135) are very close.Thisindicates that the second disk failed recently.

Start working in FreeBSD

Add COPIES ofthe VDI imagesmade earlier to the FreeBSD 4.6.2 machine and boot it

Mount the first partition of either Disk1 or Disk 2, but not Disk3, and look at /dev inthere.

Add ‘block special' files that you'll need later:

mknod /dev/raid0 200 65538 root:operator

mknod /dev/rraid0d 200 3 root:operator

mknod/dev/raid0d 200 3 root:operator

The /dev/raidctl device is supposed to be made as part of theinstallation script for raidframe – look in /dev/src/etc/MAKEDEVfor the exact syntax, but I think it is mknod /dev/raidtcl 200 (?) root:operator

Now set up Network Shares:

Pick a folder, and share it in windows.

Now add a mapping in the config ofthe VirtualBox folder.

You will need to use SMBto connect to windows hosts:

Mounting the disk:

mount_smbfs -I 192.168.2.15 //gbronner@BUTTERHEAD/myshare

You will need to provide your password.

I usually put this into a script, as you'llprobably reboot this virtual machine fairly often.

Verify this by doing file/mnt/disk1/dev/raid0dand verifying that your file is set up in the same way

Download RaidFrame for FreeBSD

Raidframe download using lynx

Now follow the instructions on that page to remake it (Iused the module mode)

Write the config file

See Michael's discussion.I believe that the actual arrangement of drives should be

Disk1

Disk0

Disk2 ,which is howthey appear from left to right in the box, but not how they appear in FreeBSD,where you will have /ad1 pointing to disk 1, /ad2/ pointing to disk0, and /ad3pointing to disk 2.

It isn't documented, but I had good luck adding a sectionto the raid.conf file:

START debug

EngineDebug 1

printDAGSDEBUG 1

Look in the options file for more suggestions.

Fire up the raid

If you have all disks, you might as well try running the Raidframe:

raidctl –c <confile> raid0

Use the scroll-lock and pageup/pagedown to scroll through errors.

If it mounts cleanly, great.If not, try raidctl–C to force-mount it.This will instructit to throw away some of the updates.

Modify the Kernel

I modified two spots: one in ConfigureDisk,where I elimated the check to verify that the diskwas, in fact a real device, This allows you to use an empty drive bay and keepsthe array from going into RAID0 mode.

The second one was in raidctl ---I eliminated the check to verify that the device existed, if it was named'absent'

Modify the Config File

Stick the ‘absent' entry in place of the failed disk.

Mine looked like this:

START disks
/dev/ad1s3
absent
/dev/ad2s3

Reboot and restart raidctl – itshould work now.I got something thatlooked like this on one of my attempts, and I fixed the geometry – notice howit tells you where it thinks the disk should go via the Row/Column listings vswhat was stored onthe disk.If this happens, reboot,change the config file and try again.

FSCK the disk

You will not be able to use the disk until you've fscked it.If yourraid configuration is wrong, you'll get bunches of errors.I had a few errors, and I answered ‘Y' toall of the questions.This seems ok –the original NAS bootup script did thisautomatically.Luckily the UFS filesystem has redundant superblocks and inodes.

Mount the Filesystem

mkdir /mnt/baddata

mount/dev/raid0 /mnt/baddata

Now go and copy everything off the disk.Go out and buy a new backup solution.

RAIDFrame is a log-structuredblock device. The main reason to do this is that RAID5 is not optimized forsmall writes – this system gathers them up and writes them at the end.

What I think happened here is that I lost one drive (0), andthe system shifted to operating in degraded state.Because the third drive had issues beingrecognized by the bios (and had some write errors), the startup script on drive1 assumed that this was now half of a RAID1 array, and tried to boot fromit.This obviously failed, but notbefore RaidFrame had updated the Mod Counter and putsome meta data in that described the new geometry ofthe array.On subsequent reboots, thisnew meta data conflicted with the prior geometry and RaidFrame got confused and quit.

This took me severaldays of work.It was not easy, and Ihave a graduate degree in CS.I'msurprised that there are nouser-level programsto readand unscramble the data on a RAID system.