The HP Media vault stored files on multiple disks. The most notable indicator is that the boot sector of the first disk has the string “Broadcom NAS Version 1.1 MBR Tag” at the start, and there is no partition information in the boot sector.

The version we saw recently was two disks, of different sizes, but logically in the NAS it looked like a single disk. It is actually configured as a Job Bunch Of Disks (JBOD). This means there is no redundancy, and the data is stored over the multiple disks, in this case in three areas. Fortunately, the areas of the disk are stored in control sectors, and so it was possible to reconstruct the logical area of the disk.

When the Analyse function is selected in the JBOD configuration, the parameters for the HP vault disk will be read and be displayed on the screen as the JBOD stripe values. The critical values for the stripe information are stored in the second sector of each disk is 8 byte big endian numbers, giving both physical disk offset, and length in sectors for each stripe.

Once a logical disk had been reconstructed using the RAID features of CnW, it was possible to read the data as a standard ReiserFS disk.

Thus, with the CnW RAID option, it is possible to recover data from the raw disks, even when the RAID hardware has failed. For further details of CnW RAID option, please contact CnW