Problem with a Drivestation - cannot get data off

[sidewinder]

My collegue uses a Buffalo Linkstation NAS and has a Buffalo Drivestation attached to it as an extra disk via USB.

 

He has tried it today and although the USB disk is being recognised by the Linkstation, you cannot get to the share and in the web menu you cant really do anything with the drive except format it.

 

We tried attaching the drive directly to a Windows machine, predictably couldnt get anything. Then tried with a Mac, it wouldnt mount it (although I thought it would) but the disk utility at least told us the file system was 'Linux Native'

 

So next tried booting with a Live Knoppix cd, but it came up with an error whenever we plugged it in and tried to mount it. Cant remember exactly what it is as Im not the best with Linux.

 

Bit stuck now, the last resort I can see is formatting it to NTFS in Windows and using a format recovery program to try and get some data back. But of course we might not get it all back...

 

Is there anything within Linux I can try to get it to mount?

[Geoff]

You need to establish what format the drive is. IIRC, Terrastations use XFS. Anyway, the best way of figuring it out is to grab GParted. Its available on the SystemRescueCD Live CD distro.

 

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

 

There's also plenty of fun tools for testing the disk and the filesystem too.

[starscream]

I had this exact same problem with a Buffalo Terastation, lost all connectivity and web interface and had data on there I dearly needed, oh and a hard drive went in it too.... luckily i had set it up in a raid2 config so the data was all there.

 

I had an old terastation lying about so I opened them both up and swapped some of the hard drives, rebuilt it and plugged it in, i got the interface back and I recreated the shares and raid config and hey presto, all the data was there again. As soon as I could get to the data I backed it up, formatted the terastation and upgraded the firmware.

 

First bet I would do is contact buffalo, their support is great, hopefully they will email you the latest firmware for the device that has not been released yet. They also have a lot of software at their disposal to help with this problem.

 

Like you my first port of call was knoppix live but then I realised that nothing else on god's green earth uses the same file system!

 

Sometimes I think we get carried away with our ability to chop pc's up and fix things when sometimes a call to the tech support of the item is all that is needed. I would trust buffalo can help you, they have helped me out of a few scenarios. One of the main reasons I buy buffalo is that I heard good things about the support, they were ringing me back with different solutions, I didn't have to chase anything up. Think their local support is in ireland.

[starscream]

You need to establish what format the drive is. IIRC, Terrastations use XFS. Anyway, the best way of figuring it out is to grab GParted. Its available on the SystemRescueCD Live CD distro.

 

http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

 

There's also plenty of fun tools for testing the disk and the filesystem too.

 

if it is any help, I could not figure out a way to read the data on the hard drives without using the terastation itself. The file system is obscure. I think it is a variation of linux but I couldn't find anything to read it. You maye have more time but I seriously suggest ringing Buffalo.

[sidewinder]

Thanks starscream, I'll let him know your recommendation. You've got a point - we didnt even consider actually contacting them

 

Ive downloaded that CD Geoff, will give it a go

[western]

Try installing partition magic on a pc and connecting the usb drive to it, the drive station is formatted as xfs, and partition magic can read this file system, but copying data from it through pm, is a VERY slow process!

[selu]

Buy a new linkstation plug in backup drive and restore then next time you set up the linkstation backup format the backup drive to fat then you will be able to read on any pc hoptb this helps happened to me this week for fast access plug backupdrive into someoneelses linkstation and read drive via \\linkstation