Help! - how do I assess hard drive state if NAS is inop?

[jgskiffington]

Hello there.

I have a 4 year old AS5304T with 2 slots filled. I can't remember what RAID config. We've had some flakey power lately, and although its on an UPS and does power up, the NAS isn't responsive - no access via ethernet or via USB. Connecting a monitor via HDMI only shows a black screen with a cursor, and adding a mouse doesn't help. When powered on, the drives to click and bang away as if there is something trying to happen. I've removed both drives and added them to a simple enclosure, but while both my windows machine and my mac mini can tell there is a drive in the enclosure, but want me to format the drives. I haven't done this out of fear of losing the data. Is there a way to confirm whether the drives are good without purchasing another NAS? Thanks.

[snapshot]

You would need the Linux Subsystem for Windows on your PC to access the data* but running CrystalDiskInfo on your PC should tell you about the drive health. You were right not to format the drives as you definitely would have lost your data.

*As long as you'd used RAID1, not RAID0.

[jgskiffington]

@snapshot- Thanks! WSL didn't much care for the BTRFS format, but CrystalDiskInfo identified them as Raid1 and 'healthy', and from there I found DiskInternals, which totally did the trick- saving my data off of the drives now. I really appreciate your help on this one!