Harddrive Recovery / Transfer to New Drive in Stora

Introduction

So you want to upgrade your 1TB drive to a 2Tb drive and move your files across to the new drive. It can be done without backup however be warned:

- this worked for me on my Stora with Firmware revision 2.5.1

- you will lose customisations where these are saved to the hardrive

- this method is best for a few large directories; not complex multiaccount many directory systems (which can be tedious to copy and reconfigure)

- you may loose everything if something goes wrong

Instructions

Remove your existing drive Insert your new drive Login to the web interface Goto Disk Management Select Configure New Drive

you now have a 2TB Stora

Login using SSH and use the All-in-one setup script to reconfigure as you desire (get root access if you havebnt already) As a minimum

 - set PATH
 - Swap the SSH Daemon
 - IPKG
 - Move /opt
 - Install midnightcommander file manager(ipkg install mc)

Now familiarise yourself with mc lest you do damage. RTFM!!!

Insert you original drive into slot 2. In the web interface you will be prompted to configure the new drive DO NOT DO THIS !!!!!! Stora is trying to RAID the drive. Cancel or you will loose your data. It may reprompt you DO NOT CONFIGURE THE DRIVE!!!!!

Now using SSH, mount the original drive to a directory called recover in your "FamilyLibrary".

cd /home/0common

mkdir recover

mount /dev/sdb1 recover

You can now access the contents of your original drive at /home/0common/recover.

Using mc, I suggest you copy the files you want to retain to a new directory on the larger drive (eg to another directory in the FamilyLibrary, then move them using renmov in mc to the desired location on the larger drive. Two reasons for this:

1. Copy instead of move, since move deletes from the original drive which it may be better not to do just yet.

2. It will still take about 20-24 hours to copy 1TB from drive to drive (about 13.5 MB/s - much faster than using a USB drive). Renmov using mc is almost instantaneous when moving on the same drive. (Do not do this using a PC across the network as it deeats the purpose).

Be careful entering the paths in mc. Review the Stora directory structure, particularly the "FamilyLibrary" which is actually /home/0common.

It may be possible to copy the changes you had previously made to your Stora since the full filesystem is visible on the original drive. I didnt do this and started again with clean Stora.

Update from 5.2.2012 by czernitko

Note 1: if you leave your stora without any harddrive, then plugging in the first drive (in any slot) will result in Stora rebuilding your drive WITHOUT ASKING!... Only when inserting the second drive you have the option not to add the drive to a raid array.

Note 2: if you have lost your Stora (mine had gone for repairs due to NAND damage and I was left just with my two 2TB drives), you might need to access your data. First thought : just plug the drive into a running linux machine, mount the partition and you are good to go. Too simple, you say? Well, you cannot directly mount the drive, because it is a raid member. I have written a little howto for mounting harddrives from Stora on another running linux distribution. Hope it helps.