Western digital network drive failure - Linux Question...

RobertP

RobertP

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My 500 Gb WD netcenter drive appears to have died or at least become extremely unwell. I use it as my main backup drive. As far as I can remember there should be nothing on it that does not exist somewhere else.

The drive still appears as a 'computer' on my network and shows its config folder and a printers folder (but without the attached printer now). The shared folders with the actual data are no longer there.

Now it is not essential that i attempt data recovery on this drive but I'd like to give it a go just to check there is nothing un-replaceable on it. Reading up on the net it seems network drives use a Linux based operating system of some sort and a linux file system on the drive.

So fishing the drive out of the case and plugging it into windows isn't going to help. I found a $70 shareware program that claims it can do just that but I was wondering if there is some boot from a Cd linux version that could run a recovery program on the drive? bearing in mind of course I have next to no experience with Linux! Anyone know if it is worth a shot or should I just forget the idea?
 
It might not be linux! Try a recovery with Sandisk Rescue pro. It will work if it's not linux and the drive is not mechanically goosed!
 
If you only want to read the data on the disk, you can try to use a Linux Live CD to look around the disk, presuming it uses one of the usual Linux file systems.

A Linux Live CD is a CD you can boot from and try out Linux without touching your hard drives if you don't want to.
There are many of them, one of the best known is Knoppix. It's fairly slow, since it fill almost the whole CD and loads data from it from time to time. I'd suggest trying out this one first.
If you'll find Knoppix too slow, there's TinyMe (a Linux distribution for older PCs, quite easy to use too) and Slitaz (ultra lightweight yet surprisingly nice - it's a 30MB download).

Let us know how this goes.

EDIT: Some links to get you going:
Knoppix: http://www.knoppix.net/ (download via ftp, your web browser can handle this kind of a download).
Slitaz: http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/ (grab an ISO of the stable version)
TinyME: http://www.tinymelinux.com/doku.php/download

ISO is a disk image, your favourite cd/dvd burner can almost certainly burn one of these. If it can't, try ImgBurn.
 
I'm guessing the file table at least is corrupted so a driver to allow the disk to be read in windows may not help as I will still need a disk repair utility like the one I downloaded. It will have to wait though until I have a new network drive to take the data or new backups.

Time to get my 2nd backup on USB drives back up to date I think.

Just typed this and i thought I'd plug the power back in as it has been off for an hour or so. Lots of whirring then a steady blue light instead of a flashing one. It has only recovered itself and I can see the files again!!

Don't trust it and will replace it but Phew! (and there is nothing on there that is not a copy :) )
 
It's gone again now :lol:

At least I confirmed there was nothing needing saving from it during the time it was in remission!

I did mess with red hat linux years ago but never really understood what I was doing. I guess playing with a CD based version doesn't need much commitment. Could be something for the long winter evenings :)

Thanks again for the suggestions.
 
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