Access Western Digital My Book World II RAID array on my Ubuntu Linux

Question

My WD My Book World II (Blue Rings) NAS has overheated, I think the motherboard is dead. I extracted the disks and plugged them in my desktop PC running Ubuntu Linux.

The disks seems to be alive, they are spinning and the BIOS recognize them but Ubuntu is not able to boot as soon as these drives are plugged in. I got an initramfs shell after few minutes telling explaining that the root disk is not available. I suspect that one of my WD drives took the precedence on the system?

Considering that Ubuntu is able to boot and can see my Western Digital disks... is it possible to access the RAID 0 array? How?

Answer 1

IDE, SATA, what?

It might be worth getting a hold of a pair of USB to <whatever> adapters so you can plug them in once Ubuntu has booted. Alternatively, edit your /etc/fstab to use the GUID of your disks to ensure that it isn't trying to use the WD disks.

Answer 2

You could try apt-get install dmraid. Here is man page. This could find and import automatically your RAID array. This presumes both devices are found by Ubuntu.