I've got a bit of an issue that I'm hoping you can help me with.

I have an Iomega ix4 as my NAS. This runs Linux and each drive in the box has 2 partitions: one for the OS and RAID info, and the second for the actual data. I had it configured as RAID5.

Recently one of the drives failed. At this point all of the data was available, it was just reporting a failed drive.

I had a drive of the same capacity (although not the exact same spec) which I swapped in place of the failed drive.

It recognised it, and started to rebuild the data protection. So far so good ... or so I thought.

The next day, after data protection had finished reconstructing, the NAS was telling me that 4 new drives had been added, and wanted confirmation to overwrite the data. Obviously I declined to do this.

I swapped the failed drive back in again, in the hope that it would return to its previous state of the data being accessible, but one failed disk. However it didn't - it still tells me that the NAS has 4 new drives in it.

I am hopeful that the actual data is untouched, so what I need to do is get it to rebuild the RAID without touching the data on the disks.

I have ssh access, and have run stuff like mdadm --examine to see what I can find. The mdadm.conf file has no entry in the "definitions of existing MD arrays" section.

I have not run any actual rebuilding commands as yet, because this is entering an area which I am out of my depth in.

Please can someone advise the best way of getting my data? Thanks.