[interrupted expansion] Am I completely cooked? Please someone tell me otherwise...

Tonight I'm telling you a sad story -_,-

I was expanding a SHR2 volume on my DS1821+ from 6 disks to 7. Near the end of phase 2, I wanted to watch a UHD disc rip stored on the NAS, but the read throughput was terrible. I decided to copy the rip off the NAS first. Being a smart ass as I was, I ran this random command found in an old Reddit comment, hoping it would pause/throttle the reshape so I could get the movie out faster:

!echo frozen > /sys/block/md2/md/sync_action!<

BAD CHOICE.

The NAS crashed and rebooted. After it came back up, my volume was gone, the NAS was beeping, and the disks were busy. Over SSH, I can see the NAS now thinks it was expanding “md4” from 7 to 8 disks:

md4 : active raid6 sata1p6[0] sata7p6[6] sata6p6[5] sata5p6[4] sata4p6[3] sata3p6[2] sata2p6[1]
73210770240 blocks super 1.2 level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [8/7] [UUUUUUU_]
[>....................] reshape = 0.7% (104504240/14642154048) finish=5143.1min speed=47110K/sec
bitmap: 0/110 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

I waited it out for three days. BAD CHOICE as I always made.

After things finally settled down, the NAS reports the volume as “crashed” (i.e., not mountable) and the pool as “degraded” (i.e., missing 1 disk out of an 8‑disk pool).

After some careful command-line fu (assisted by ChatGPT), I’m pretty sure this is completely out of my hands. To my surprise (and giving me a bit of hope), Synology support didn’t immediately dismiss my ticket for “drives outside the compatibility list” or “custom command was run.” Instead, some kind Paul asked for remote access and had me create an admin account for troubleshooting.

On day two, I was told: “The partition still exists on the drives; however, our recovery attempts were unsuccessful,” and that I should “contact a local recovery team.”

I don’t know to what extend that implied there is still chance to get my data back, more than 60 TB data.

After some clarification, it sounds like I need to find a third‑party data recovery company on my own. I’m planning to contact DriveSavers in the Bay Area later this week.

Has anyone experienced a similar situation? How much hope do I realistically have?