Last week i found myself having to mount a lvm2 partitioned disk from a raid 1 array of an Iomega Storcenter ix2-200 NAS. Restoring data from a raid 1 disk without a raid controller unfortunately isn’t as straigth forward as just connecting the drive and copying the data. However, access to the disk can be accomplished with a few simple steps. Assuming the disk is still in tact. (in my case, one of the disks was in tact)
What you need:
– A pc with two sata connections. One for the source disk and one for the destination disk.
– An ubuntu live cd or bootable usb stick with ubuntu or a pc with Ubuntu installed. (I used version 12.04.3)
– Connection to the internet
Make sure your disks are connected prior to booting.
In my case the iomega ix2-200 nas made use of an lvm2 file system. By default ubuntu linux (nor windows) does not support this filesystem.
Support for this filesystem can be added easily
//installing support for the lvm2 file system
apt-get install lvm2
//load the device mapper kernel module
modprobe dm-mod
With performing the above steps the support for the LVM2 file system is added. The next steps will rely on mdadm for reading the raid information from the disk.
//install mdadm first. When asked for configuring postfix choose “ok” or “no configuration”
apt-get install mdadm
//create a virtual device for the disk. replace /dev/sdb2 with your raid 1 drive. use df -h and df -ah to figure out the correct drive. /dev/md9 will be the virtual device created.
mdadm -A -R /dev/md9 /dev/sdb2
//last step is to mount the virtual device
mount /dev/md9 /mnt
Now you should have access to the contents of the raid 1 drive from your nas. Copy to the destination disk using the gui or using the command line.