[Coco] Linux NAS recovery

[Frank Swygert]

If there is indeed a problem with Windows reading the drives it's because the NAS manufacturer modified Linux to do something it doesn't normally do. That's easily possible in Linux because it's modular and source is readily available. More likely the problem is as Lothan points out -- you don't have a full copy of Linux to work with, so lack the tools. There are a couple specific Linux based recovery disks out there that are optimized to recover Windows, since it's hard to do with Windows in some cases (like low level reading/writing to drives) or requires specialized (and usually expensive) software to be done in Windows.

I'm not "all into" Linux like Gene and some of these other guys. I replaced Windows with Linux Mint and don't intend to go back. I'm strictly a user on Linux though! I can struggle through using the command line with some help (mainly tutorials on how to do something, plenty out there!), but prefer NOT to use it. Don't have to very often, occasionally to install something or make some small mod to get specific hardware to work, or tweak the system. There are some irritations.... there is no integrated label printing/contact database software, for instance. Something simple! Traditional Linux programming breaks things up into specialized tasks. So I have to use a contact database program then use the created database with a separate label printing program. This seemingly makes the task more complicated, but once set up it's not that bad... though I haven't done it yet (I still boot my old Windows computer and keep my mailing database on it... just easier for now). I'm running EVERYTHING else on Linux. I have Virtual Box with WinXP loaded, but haven't used it, and my "game" machine is dual boot Linux Mint and XP, but I haven't booted XP in over a year. The only reason I set it up to dual boot is to play a few games (MC Combat Flight Sim to be specific), but don't have a lot of time to sit and play games... Games is about the only thing Windows has better support of than Linux.

There is, however, a learning curve to overcome when switching over like I did a couple years ago. Some with the OS because it works slightly different than Windows in some ways, but it's mostly software. It's no more than switching products in Windows though -- like going from MS Word to some other word processor.

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Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2012 00:12:28 -0400
From: "Lothan"<lothan at newsguy.com>
Subject: Re: [Coco] Screen capture

Stephen H. Fischer wrote:

> The NAS uses the free Linux software and there is no capability of
> recovering now. Before as it was RAID 1 I could replace the disk and
> recover everything. Previous Seagate product was sent to Mexico for
> replacement three times before Seagate took pity on me and upgraded to a
> better product. A 1" fan for two drives in a box that was as tight as it
> could have been made. :-II
>
> If it really was NTFS then I could mount the drive in one of my desktop
> machines and use lots of programs to recover.
>
> With EXT3 I am screwed.

Been there, done that when an Infrant ReadyNAS went belly up due to
inadequate cooling of the power supply and Netgear kept giving me the
runaround to avoid honoring the warranty. But, it's not actually all that
bad, Stephen. I booted my notebook from an Ubuntu Live CD, plopped the
drives one-by-one into an external BlacX SATA to USB adapter, and copied the
files over the LAN to my Windows desktop. It took a few hours, but it was
easy enough.

If you don't have two computers, you can even use an external USB drive as
the destination or burn the files onto a bunch of DVDs or a pile of CDs.

If push comes to shove, there is also free software that lets you read
EXT2/EXT3 file systems directly from Windows.