Subscribe Feed (RSS)Replacing the Hard Disks in an Iomega StorCenter ix2
March 5th, 2009 by Paul Sterley | Filed under Hardware.I have determined that it is possible to replace the hard disks in an Iomega StorCenter ix2 (and have the thing work afterward). You don’t have to send it in for service or throw it away. However, it is not super-easy to do it, and I would not recommend it to anyone who is not comfortable working with the innards of computers.
If you’re not good with hardware, STOP! and take it to an authorized service center.
Here is the procedure to replace the hard disks:
1. Remove the existing disks from the unit. That means removing a lot of screws and connectors, and carefully squeezing the disks out. Removing the power and SATA connectors is helpful, but not necessary.
2. Make a disk image of a good disk from the StorCenter, if either of its disks are still good. I used Acronis True Image Home version 11 to back up and restore the disk image.
3. Use disk imaging software to put the images on your new disks. You might only need the image to be on one disk, but I didn’t bother figuring out if that is true, or which one it should be on. You can restore to larger disks, upgrading the capacity of your StorCenter. Be sure to restore the entire disk, with all partitions, I tried restoring just the OS partition, but it would not boot.
4. Use partition editing software (Windows disk manager?) to remove the large partition from each disk, leaving the small (OS) one. The StorCenter will rebuild this on its own.
5. Reassemble the StorCenter, boot it, and check the status on the Disks section of the UI. First it will initialize the data partition, which only takes a few minutes. Then it will reconstruct the data set, which takes much longer – but the drive will be fully functional (albeit slow) while this is happening.
Of course, I am certain that doing this voids any sort of warranty – but if your warranty was still good, you wouldn’t be doing this, would you?
Here is a PDF file containing instructions from Iomega: Replacing_the_StorCenter_ix2_Hard_Drive
Update:
One of the commenters, Suren, has graciously agreed to host the Acronis image file using his plentiful resources. You can get the file here. Thanks, Suren!
The username/password for the Storcenter login is admin/(blank). The password for its Linux OS is root/soho.
Make sure you fix the e-mail setting. It will not prompt you, and it is set to user@domain.com in the image.
In fact, you’ll probably want to run through the quick setup wizard to set everything the way you want it. To do this, click the Settings tab, Device button, and click the Setup link next to Device Setup.
Tags: Iomega, NAS, StorCenter
Before reading this post, I have tried to replace
a bad drive in my storecenter ix2.
I used the same procedure, made an image of the good drive with acronis 11 home also tried acronis
true image workstation and 2009 home. I am very familiar with acronis and have been using it for years.
While running the image I received the message
that you are imaging a Linux os and if it is bootable you may need to install Linux boot files.
If it is not bootable click ok to continue.
I continued and the drive copied successfully.
I removed the large partition and left the 996meg
in place.
I reinstalled the drives and powered up the storecenter.
I get the flashing blue light for about 20 seconds, then it looks like the drives are being accessed for about 10 seconds only to go back to a
flashing blue light.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
When I went through this, I did not see any warning message about the Linux OS boot files from Acronis True Image Home version 11.
I also used two identical disks (not the disks it came with, I bought two Western Digital 500GB disks). If you’re replacing one disk, perhaps the disk geometry is different enough between them to cause a problem?
Also, if you are doing this with an ix2, it’s probably still under warranty, as the ix2 has not yet been on the market for a year – so I would suggest getting a warranty replacement.
If this is out of warranty, it’s probably not the ix2 model. If it has IDE disks instead of SATA, it’s not the ix2. I only tested this procedure with the ix2.
the drive is still under warranty and I will send
it back. I just wanted to see if it could be repaired for future reference.
The drives are identical. I pulled one out of a second ix2 I have that is running o.k.
I’m not sure what to tell you then. The lights kept flashing, but did the web interface ever become accessible? After restoring mine, I did have to go into the interface and rebuild the storage.
Also, you said you took an image of a good drive – but did you take that image of the remaining good drive after the failure occurred, or did you take that image of a drive that had been in a system that had not yet failed?
My image was from a fully working system, not the remaining drive from a system with one failed disk. That might make a difference.
The image I took was from a fully working drive,
and no I cannot access the interface.
I need a steady light in order to do that.
I think the disk image is missing the linux boot
files because I put the imaged drive back into the
fully working drive and it came up fine.
I even took both hard drives out of the working ix2 and put them in the non working unit and it
also came up fine.
These drives are worthless to me if the drives cannot be replaced after the warranty runs out.
Thanks for all your help.
It could be that there is a “master” drive and that you have to get the image off of the correct drive, and perhaps I got lucky with mine.
Anyway, I have proven conclusively that it is possible to replace the hard disks. I replaced both of the Seagate disks that came with it, putting WD disks in their place, and was 100% successful in restoring the device to full functionality. Best of luck in your efforts. Perhaps you’ll try again with more success.
Just to give you an update, I was able to get the drives copied using R-Drive to clone the disks. (sector by sector raw copy)
Takes some time but it works.
My ix2 is up and running good.
Hi!
Does any one have the image of the system linux files for the ix2?
Both of my HDD have broken down! Now i’m missing the system!
Please help me !
send me a message to
metemedo24(at)gmail.com
Thanks,
Rui
Thanks for taking the time to write this great article.
Reading your directions, it appears you are copying data to the primary partition on the drive, and then deleting that partition. This seems counterproductive. What am I missing?
Also, what’s the plan if both disks are bad? I’m assuming the OS is stored on the disks, and not on a ROM.
Thanks!
I just went through the trouble of trying to recover from the Ix2 storcenter. FYI — this will invalidate your warranty but sometimes the data is worth more than the drive itself.
After trying all kinds of crazy ideas of mounting in Ubuntu and using many different recovery tools on my RAID 1 set up, I was extremely successful when I downloaded R-Linux for FREE!! I had to go buy a usb to SATA adapter since I only have a laptop to plug into, but using my windows virtual machine I was able to get the file system mapped within about 4 hours for my 500GB disk’s second partition. It then took a couple of hours to locate which files were important, but I recovered roughly 95% of what was missing. Coughing up the 100s to 1000s of dollars for data recovery just wasn’t in the budget right now. So if you’re simply after the data and not rebuilding (and don’t mind tampering with the Drive enclosure), this option worked very well for their choice of the ext2 and ext 3 file systems. (I tried Disk Doctor, Nucleus Data Recovery, Disk Internals, EXT2FSD, EXT2IFS, and the RAID utilities within Linux with little success on the storage partition).
Both my drives are defect due to power failure. I am lost since Iomega does not warrant power failures. Their support is really disappointing to say the least.
Desperately looking for an image for the storcenter iX2 to get it working again. Can anybody help and make an image and contact me via mail?
Hi,
I managed to get an image from one of the guys here online.
I did manage to upgrade the two drives from 500 to 2 Terabytes each, by using Parallel Fusion to boot a UBUNTU Linux, and do most of the File partitioning.
First, by setting the first 1 partition, sector 1 to 127 (1gig) to Ext2 and sector 128 to end to Ext3.
Again, in Linux, I set the drive be in RAID-1
I used Acronis to restore 1st partition as a drive and not as files
and restored Files from 2nd Partition backup, as files and folders to the 2nd partition on the drive (very important if you upgrading the drive, not to a Partition to Partion Restore).
I then returned the drives to the Ix2storcenter, and let it boot, and have it do the final cloning.
Now I have a Raid-1, 2-Terabytes x 2 = 2 Terabytes NAS
Hope that helps.
Bootsee
Thanks much OP for this tutorial! However Bobs, you really saved my life. I would have never ever been able figure out how to recover my data from my storcenter drives. I backed up all my data to my type 1 raid thinking I was secure with redundant data. when the unit itself failed I was utterly lost. Your post was the light at the end of a very dark tunnel.
Hi,
Bootsee, could you provide me that image as well?
I need it baddly….
I had my Iomega configured as a JBOD (not sensitive data) and one drive crashed …. now the blue LED stays blinking ….
How can I rebuild with 1 new drive???
I bought a new ix2, with the intent of replacing the 500gb drives with 2TB. I read this thread and many others before coming up with this much more low tech method of replacing the drives. No reason it shouldn’t work with an older unit. My firmware is 2.1.30.8298. I used Seagate drives (same brand as the original 500gb).
Step 1: Insure your drives are blank and set up as Raid 1 (mirrored).
Step 2: Disconnect one drive, boot the unit, it reports a drive failure.
Step 3: Install a new drive (in my case, 2TB) in the now unplugged drive case.
Step 4: Reboot the unit, using software restart on the Dashboard page.
Step 5: Go to Settings, Disks, Manage Disks link.
Step 6: Click “Erase Disks”. If the drives are not blank, erase everything out of shared areas, including empty directories.
Step 7: Use the option “Restore to factory defaults”, checking the box that verifies you’re aware this erases everything.
Step 8: Wait. The initial restore of the 500gb (copying to the 2TB) took 3 hours.
When this process is done, the unit should be done, and restart, taking through initial setup again, renaming the unit and putting in a notify email address. It should report both drives under the “Disks” and report 464gb free.
Next, I restarted with only the 2TB in place. Went back and repeated steps 2-8, again erasing empty directories and restoring to factory defaults. This time instead of 3 hours, it took about 9 hours.
After it was done the 2nd time, it reports both of the new drives in place, and 1.8TB free. My final step was to change Raid 1 to Raid 0, merging the drives into a single 3.6TB volume. I believe the unit is using sequential RAID, not striped. Write speeds are consistent with what a single drive could maintain, about 30mb/sec. I used 5900rpm low power drives.
So while this was very time consuming, the internal OS basically did all the work for me. I typed this from memory, and am not nearly as educated as most of the posters in this forum, I’m sure the process can be improved upon.
Hope this can help!
Hello all,
Great bit of info on the Storcenter, which is horribly lacking in technical documentation.
Sadly, I have fallen victim to the flashing blue light myself. I have one drive wtih a total head crash, and the other has gone flaky and will only boot “part way” and drive access stops suddenly.
I would really like to get a copy of the “good” image of the ext2 partition, and if someone could provide that…I would be eternally grateful.
adaptel22@hotmail dot com – Thanks.
My problem is: I do not have a good image, so I cannot rebuild.
Who can help me??
bno1960@hotmail.com
Would like to add that a single bad disk can be replaced. I imaged a new drive from the other good one and then deleted the large partition and let the device rebuild the dataset. It reported that disk 2 (the new one) had incorrect data once replaced. Let it rebuild it and you should be good to go.
For what it’s worth, I’ll never buy another Iomega product again. It should be easier to replace than it is. Forcing you to send it back to them is ridiculous at best.
I had a single drive in my old 1TB ix2 fail, and simply replaced it with another Seagate 500 GB drive. It was as simple as determining which drive failed, opening the case, unplugging the old and plugging in the new. When I rebooted, the ix2 found the new drive and restored automatically. I think I was back online within 2 hours.
This is no help to someone foolish enough to run RAID 0, or the rare case when both drives die simultaneously (more likely a fault in the main board of the ix2 than actual drive failure), but it does work as intended in the vast majority of cases when one drive dies and the other is still fully functional.
Normally, I would agree with you that in the vast majority of cases, only a single disk fails, and the built-in recovery method is good enough. However, there have been a significant number of double failures, and it’s hard to ignore that. Of the 8 units I recommended that my customers buy, One was DOA. Four of them have had single disk failures. Two have had fan failures, which led to disk failures.
I believe that Iomega normally makes decent products, but I believe that this one is a bad design. Two disks, cramped into that small space together, with that VERY small fan to try and cool those two disks = fan failures and drive failures.
Also, there are reasons where running RAID0 is not foolish. For example, what if you are using the StorCenter as a backup device to store disk-based backups from your file server? The server has disk redundancy. The backup device does not need to have redundancy, but it does need to have a lot of capacity. If you have a failure in your StorCenter, you shrug your shoulders and replace the disk, and start over with your backup chain. If you have a double failure, and it is out of warranty, then you grit your teeth and decide whether to rebuild the device or toss it in the recycle pile.
This has been a really useful thread for me, too. My Ix2 is only 15 months old and been pretty lightly used. It looks like one disk has gone bad.
To bad_ix2, I think I am in your situation.
I have a constant red light on my ix2 and the Windows manager program reports one disk not accessible. This is the message:
“1 disk is missing from your Iomega StorCenter device. Your data is still available, but data may be lost if another disk is removed or fails.”
When I click on “Disk Management” I get this:
Disk Size
Disk 1 0 B
Disk 2 (ST3500820AS) 466 GB
My question is how I identify Disk 1 and Disk 2 if I open the box.
I am just backing up the contents of Disk 2 to a second external hard drive. Seems no reason to me to do a disk image as mentioned above, right?
Seems to me your best bet, if you cannot identify which drive is failed, would be to remove one drive, put it in a workstation. If the drive is not even recognized by the BIOS, then you’ve found it. You can put the other one in and see if it looks any different. You won’t be able to access the file system, but you don’t need to.
If it’s not obvious which one has the problem, then download the diagnostic tools for your drive manufacturer (Seagate and Western Digital both have downloadable diagnostic tools, and I am sure others do as well). If the drive is SMART enabled, it will be very easy to find out if the disk is bad. If not, then you’ll have to run the drive tests to determine which one is bad.
No, it does not sound as if you need to re-image. You just need to replace the bad drive and let it rebuild from the other one.
These are exactly the symptoms I observed, and was very worried the drive may not be able to recover from this, as I also seemed to have trouble rebooting the ix2 while in this state. Thankfully, swapping the bad drive fixed all.
If you contact iomega tech support, they will send you a PDF file which tells you how to identify the bad disk, and has the whole screw-by-screw replacement procedure. For reference, the file is named Replacing_the_StorCenter_ix2_Hard_Drive.pdf.
If you send me the PDF file, I will post it in the article. I’m sending you an e-mail now.
Forgot to answer one question… I did not bother messing with disk images, etc. I have not used UNiX in 15 years / would not know how to do it anyway. I just swapped out the bad drive, booted the device, and watched it rebuild. I think it took about 2 hours to rebuild my array, with about 100 GB of data on it, although I’ve heard of others taking twice that long with more data.
The tech support at iomega seems highly variable. One guy I dealt with was very helpful and knowledgeable. One other wanted to be very helpful, but wasn’t so knowledgeable. A third was neither.
I identified my bad disk by going into the disk manager and noting which disk had failed. In my case it was disk two. Once you get the ix2 apart, you can look on the board (I just about needed a magnifying glass) and you will see SATA1 and SATA2 next to the sata connectors. These correspond to disk one and disk two.
Also, when I just simply replaced my bad disk without putting anything on it, I could not get the ix2 to boot up. I tried several things but what worked for me is what I described above.
Thanks to the author I now have the image file and as promised here’s the link to download it.
http://www.fibernet.am/d/StorCenter.tib
Good Luck!
Suren.
One thing I do not understand:
In my case Harddrive failed, but the blue LED keeps flashing. I cannot even log on to the Iomega ..
Strange, isn’t it logical and necessary to be able to logon so you can do something?
What a piece of cr*p….. NEVER AGAIN
What happened here is that iomega banked on the idea that only one hard disk would fail at any given time. If one hard disk fails, you can boot from the other and it tells you what is broken and that you need to send it in for warranty repair. If both disks fail, though, you get no indication of what is wrong. And the unit was designed poorly enough that both disks failing at the same time happened a lot more often than they figured it would.
In my opinion, they failed miserably on these counts:
1. They failed to design the chassis to have good ventilation on its own and disperse the heat from two disks – especially Seagate disks, which are known to generate a lot of heat and fail due to heat.
2. They failed to include a fan that was properly sized and rated for the load. Tiny fans have to spin very fast to push enough air, and as a result they wear out faster. Combine that with the cheapest fan they could find from some outfit in China, and the fan failure counts are going to be high.
3. They used fast, hot-running disks. Why do we need 7200 RPM disks in a device that has only a network interface which cannot possibly match the disk read/write speed?
4. They set a short warranty duration, which shows a disregard for the welfare of their customers. I want to say it was a lack of foresight as well, but maybe they saw this coming and decided to take the reputation hit after giving us the shaft. I’d really like to say that there’s no way they’d do this to us intentionally, but…
What iomega should have done differently:
1. Use a slightly larger chassis with the disks spaced out more, perhaps with a heat shield between them, using a material that sinks heat better and has ventilation holes.
2. Use a larger, higher quality fan.
3. Use low-power, energy efficient (read: low heat) disks.
4. Have a longer warranty duration, or at least admit that they goofed, make it public, and offer some concession to their customers.
…but of course if they had done these things, they would not have made as much money on us trusting fools who have enjoyed good quality iomega products in the past.
It is possible that the extra money they would have had to spend might have been offset by using lower speed disks which generate less heat, and that might have been a good move for them. It is more likely that they were offered a deal to use that specific disk in there, and more efficient disks would also have cost them more.
My HD’s where formatted as one volume.
One HD failed, but the other one is still OK ..
But stil the blue LED keeps flashing and that’s it … NEVER AGAIN.
I just bought myself a Synology 209 …..
Ah, yes, that is a good point. Since the volume was striped without parity instead of mirrored, then a single disk failure loses the data. Since they did not include a 256 MB memory chip to hold the OS it runs on, then it means a boot failure as well. That probably saved them about a dime per unit.
The DS209 is a good device, from my experience. My experience, however, is limited to one unit, and I have not seen its failure mode.
Thanks a lot all for the informations and the image file provided. They help me recover my Storcenter.
I use Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Server for Linux to restore only one drive with the image provide by Suren.
I restore a whole disk (not volumes or files) and I select restore MBR from archive file.
Then I deleted the second partition (the big one).
On the second drive, I deleted all the partitions.
Then I reassemble my Storcenter, and let the drive reconstruct all. I have access to the web console to follow the process and the red led was blinking during the process.
Hope this help.
Glad it worked out for you. Turns out the image has one of my alerting e-mail addresses set for delivery of error messages, so please remember to change the address alerts are sent to.
My ix2 dropped off the system yesterday. I checked it and the blue light was flashing slow and I could tell the drives were not spinning. I contacted Iomega and they told me the unit was out of warranty and I would have to pay for help.
My ix2 (2×500) is set up as RAID 1, so I have duplicate data. I removed both drives from the unit and Management Console in my Windows XP machine saw both of them, but I cannot access any of the three partitions on the drive.
I have Runtime RAID Recovery, but it does not work on RAID 1. I also guess these being UNIX drives might have something to do with this.
I am not at all happy with the Iomega NAS. The entire time I had it it ran very warm to the touch and I worried about the unit. Then it just quit.
Thanks for any help.
I just realized I never answered this question. I am not copying data to an existing partition, then deleting that partition. I am copying the entire disk image – partitions, boot sector, mbr, etc to a new disk, then deleting the partitions I don’t want. I tried just restoring the partitions I wanted, plus the boot sector/mbr, but that didn’t work. Restoring the entire disk, then wiping out the data partitioin and letting the StorCenter rebuild it does work. So that is what my instructions say to do. This allows for the StorCenter to use the remaining available space on the disk, which means it works for restoring to a larger disk and increasing the capacity of your StorCenter.
One of the commenters, Suren, has graciously agreed to host the Acronis image file using his plentiful resources. You can get the file here: http://www.fibernet.am/d/StorCenter.tib.
Thanks, Suren!
The username/password for the Storcenter login is admin/(blank). The password for its Linux OS is root/soho.
Make sure you fix the e-mail setting. It will not prompt you, and it is set to user@domain.com in the image.
In fact, you’ll probably want to run through the quick setup wizard to set everything the way you want it. To do this, click the Settings tab, Device button, and click the Setup link next to Device Setup.