Repair Bricked iOmega Storcenter ix4

A couple of days ago, a costumer called me to tell me his storage wasn’t reachable anymore. The status on the lcd screen was giving a loading bar and got stuck at some point. He has a iOmega Storcenter ix4, I told him to do the basic things:

• reboot the device
• disconnect all the cables and reconnect it, then try to boot the device

Nothing helped … customer in panic so there went my evening.
Went over there and retried the basic stuff myself (no joy).
After a while trying some different angles nothing seemed to work, so i took it home with me.

After a sleepless night surfing, searching, trying stuff out ….
I found the solution, with no data loss non the less.

To unbrick it you need a linux computer, the images folder of a working ix4 and some luck 😛

The raid configured on the iOmega Storcenter is a linux software raid.
This means we can hookup the disks to a linux system and (if the dependencies are installed) see the raid, mount it and repair the boot mirrored partitions for the iOmega Storcenter.

This solution only works if the iOmega Storcenter ix4 doesn’t boot completly!

The following steps will explain how it is done:

1. Connect disks to a working Linux pc
2. Find the raid with the following command mdadm –assemble –scan –verbose
   this will search for software raid configurations on the disks
3. Do a scan for volume groups (vgscan)
4. Do a scan for physical volumes (pvscan)
5. If logical volume is inactive, activate it (vgchange <name volume group> -a y)
6. Do a scan for physical volumes (pvscan), to check if the volume is ACTIVE
7. Mount the volume (mount <volume path> <mount path>)
8. Open the path to the config raid (raid1-with iOmega config files) and restore the images folder
9. Shutdown the linux pc
10. Insert the disks back to the iomega device and boot it
11. Reconfigure the iOmega to the proper configuration (if you lost some configuration)

So if you have this problem don’t have a sleepless night searching how to repair it, just read my blog post 😛