bigbish

Hi.

I have (had) a dlink NAS (DNS300). It failed recently - but it does not appear that the HDD failed - only the ethernet port.

I would like to recover the data on the drive.

I have shopped around for a replacement but can not seem to find a second hand one; and I don't want to fork out $250+ just to find out the HDD has been damaged too!

A bit of TS and I have found that the internal drive seems to have been formatted via a UNIX system, although on install I formatted it as Fat32.

I put it in one of my XP SP2 machines. It sees the drive but does not recognise the formatting / partition or mount it.

Question then is: Is there a Util I can run on XP that will read a UNIX drive - if the drive is physically in the XP box as slave?

OR any other ideas and suggestions most welcome.

Thanks

hal8000

Don't use windows for anything mission critical like data recovery or undelete- its not the sharpest tool in the box.

All you need is a knoppix 5.11 CD. Boot with this on your windows computer, it wont touch the hard drive and runs in ram. You should see all hard drive partitions once you get to the kde desktop.

For data recovery, simply plug in a USB hard drive and you can click and drag to recover your files.

Depending on the nature of the hard drive failure some or all data recovery may be possible, if the partition table is intact you stand a better chance of success

I've never failed to get into any windows machines in the last 5 years with a knoppix disk, the same can be said against any other live linux system, but its just that knoppix is the complete swiss army knife when it comes to any job like this.

bigbish

Thanks Hal3000.

I have downloaded Knoppix and created the CD. Very, very impressed with it. (and will use it for other uses). And I'll get the lite version for a USB boot version...

Unfortunately in this case did not help.

It sees the HDD, it's 2 partitions but it can not read/mount them - returns FS errors, or codepage or superblock or....

Another froum reply tells me that the DLink nas uses the XFS file system and to try the utils at http://www.crossmeta.com/crossmeta.html but my problem is that I am weak in unix/linux so have an issue 'driving' & understanding the utils.

The respondant Sergey has reverse engineered one of these boxes so I feel he knows it in depth: http://dns-300.sergeyzh.org/wiki/

Dlink Tech reply was "As for the file format of the hard driver, I believe it is EXT2. You can mount the drive to a Linux machine and retrieve all the data." But if that was the case, I feel Knoppix would have mounted the HDD ok. Yes?

Can I get knoppix to use the XFS file system to attempt to mount the drives?

Thanks

bigbish

Hi.

Extra info

Attached is screen dumps taken from Gnome Partition under knoppix KDE.

Also in the file is a bootlog of the DNS 300 bootup

I tried the utils from crossmeta but I don't understand how to drive them

I now realise knoppix can read XFS file system so why can't it read this partition?

Also another poster said the NAS reads an older version ext2fs so files written may not be able to be read by more up to date linux..

Any thoughts?

Attached Files

GnoPart+.pdf (89.0 KB, 6 views)