Author Topic: LinkStation 421e suddenly stopped after years of working  (Read 1516 times)

loganx80

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LinkStation 421e suddenly stopped after years of working
« on: February 10, 2019, 02:45:50 PM »
I just noticed recently that I can't access my backup drive and the unit is just blinking white.  It is a 421e with 2 Toshiba 3TB hard drives.  Also, if I try to visit the unit using a browser by IP address, it just shows a gray screen now. 

I don't know a whole lot about how this all works, but I set it up nearly 5 years ago and never had a problem until now.  I pulled the drives out and tried to use an adapter to view the files on my computer and determine if there was an issue with the drive or Buffalo unit and the computer said that the drives needed to be formatted. 

Anyone have any ideas? 
If I could buy a new unit, would the hard drives be usable in it? 
Can I somehow access the files on the hard drives outside of the unit or did it format them in a proprietary format?

Any help would be appreciated.  At this point I feel like I'm just out of luck.

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Re: LinkStation 421e suddenly stopped after years of working
« Reply #1 on: February 10, 2019, 03:29:37 PM »
Quote
If I could buy a new unit, would the hard drives be usable in it?
If the problem was with the unit and not the drives this would work, but the problem is most likely with the boot/system partitions on the drives.

Quote
Can I somehow access the files on the hard drives outside of the unit or did it format them in a proprietary format?
Depending how you set them up the drives data partitions will either be part of a software raid array or two independent partitions, either way they will have been formatted as XFS. you can access them by attaching them to a linux system and installing mdadm and xfs_progs (if they aren't there already).

if the problem is specific to the boot partition you can often get up and running by switching the drives within the bays (the device boots from the first one it finds).