The QNAP fails. The dreadful event.

The disks are fine, but they are useless in any other enclosure, other than other QNAP. Even if you connect them to a PC, you won’t be able to mount them.

QNAP are using several standard Linux utilities for RAID and LVM management. However, they have added a few custom functionalities to those and have not upstreamed them. Meaning, that without a custom kernel, the disks won’t mount, and the data cannot not be read.

The solution actually came from QNAP themselves - QuTSCloud. It is a cloud QNAP OS, that can be installed in a VM.

Important tidbits:

  • Do not attach the data drives to the VM before the installation of QuTSCloud is finished
  • Single core should be sufficient for the recovery purpose
  • The virtual OS disk should be at least 50GB, or the installation will fail

Steps to recover the data are:

  1. Buy a single core license for QuTSCloud for 5$
  2. Download QuTSCloud VM image and install in a VM, using the license key from step 1
  3. Shutdown VM
  4. Attach the drives to the VM
  5. Boot the VM and it should automatically detect the storage pool
  6. Transfer the data out of the drives via SMB

After the ordeal, do not forget to cancel the subscription for QuTSCloud. If you cancel early, QNAP will even refund it.