TerraMaster Forum

OK, so it was time to upgrade my TOS4 to TOS5, and also upgrade my drives. Until now I was using various drives in my F-420 TerraMaster as single drives. To be able to install TOS5, I had to to it manually, since the update button was not available form my TOS4 settings anymore. So I installed TOS5 jsut fine. I also added 2 new Volume of 8TB drives in RAID1 mode, and added an SSD in hidden 5th bay for cache for Volume one. Now my plan was to insert the 2 old single drives from TOS4 and copy all the important data to Volume1, and then use the 2 drives in single drive mode. However, upon inserting the TOS4 single drive and creating a new single drive volume, I was prompted that all th data will be erased. This is not acceptable, so I cancelled the task. Then I decided to take the old 6TB HDD drive which was mounted as Volume4 in TOS4 in single drive mode, and by connecting it via USB and external dock to NAS to copy all the data manually. However, only a fraction of tha data is visible in File manager on this external drive. To be precise 1.72TB from almost full 6TB. this got me very worried. It's not readable in windows as external drive at all. So this now means that i ahve no way to backup the data. It would be disastrous for me to loose the data. What should I do?

Can anyone please help? All my data is on these TOS4 single drives, which I have intact, but still can't read them in any way I have tried so far. Terramster support seems to be useless by chat.

I managed to access the data on old TOS 4 drives, but only drive by drive, by manually reverting TOS to 4, and then removing the drive with the new TOS4. Then, I inserted one of the old drives in first bay, and it sprung to life with all the data. However, I can only use 1 drive at the time. So luckily I now have a chance to back everything up, with a lot of struggle though. Hopfully it will go thorugh. I am almost done with the first drive. If I'll succeed, I will throw this F4-220 where it belongs; right into the trash. TOS is a terrrible mess. Support is comical.

When you encounter the need to recreate the volume during the installation process, it is because the system fails to recognize the file system in your hard disk. Please contact our technical support by email in time. We will mount your volume for you remotely.

1. I was following instructions provided by chat support form step one!
2. Why in the world would you make an update to your own OS that doesn't support filesystem of the previous versioun of your own OS!? This doesn't make any sense. I inspected linux partitions that TOS creates on a drive. It's a total mess with 4 partitions of different type on each drive. The data is virtually inaccessible from anywhere but the exact version of TOS where it was created.

TOS is very much flawed. TOS4 was, and TOS 5 is too. Terramster hardware is actually good, but TOS is one big mess, and you should do something about the OS and your support team too, becuase those people do not know what they are doing. Their instrucitons are dangerous for users data.