Linkstation Live -- XFS Data Recovery on Windows XP

[elasticx]

   

Last week my Linkstation Live (LS1TBCHL) died on me with the infamous 6 red flashes, but I was fairly certain that it was something to do with the box and not the actually hard disk.

 

That said I would like to recover my data ASAP so I purchased an external SATA USB case to access my files.

 

However, even though the external drive works fine, and the hard disk does not appear to have any problems, Windows does not recognize the data. My guess is because the data is formatted for Linux (XFS?). Is there any way I can read my data on a Windows machine?

 

 

Thanks

 

[PCPiranha]

Unfortunately the only program that I know of that might be able to is UFSExplorer.

 

Out of curiosity what have you tried to do to fix it (there are options, E06 CAN mean lost boot image)

[beb319]

Hi,

 

I found an easy solution to this on a linux forum.  I happened to already have my PCs setup for dual boot between XP and Ubuntu.  So I bought a USB/SATA enclosure for $20 (Sabrent that supports 3.5" SATA 1/2 drives), pulled the 1st drive out of my dead NAS, put it in the Sabrent, tried it on XP, it couldn't do anything with it.  Tried the 2nd drive, it seemed to do better, but could not see it in My Computer.  Looked in Device Manager, it saw it, said there were 6 healthy partitions, but couldn't do anything else.  A little more research revealed it was formatted as an XFS filesystem by our friends at Buffalo (BTW, there is no tech support from them, when they walked me through trying to recover my NAS and finally reached the conclusion it was dead, they were like "good luck").  Finally, I did the same for both drives plugged into a USB port on one of my PCs booted in Ubuntu, and it could not do anything with the 1st (totally dead), the 2nd showed up as "Drive" but when I clicked on it got the "Could not mount" error.  Then I stumbled on the answer on the linux forum.  In a terminal window, use the following commands:

 

Without the USB drive attached do the following (on an Ubuntu system):

 

ls /dev/sd*

 

Make a note of which sd devices are present.

 

Now attach the USB drive with your hopefully still good NAS drive in it and repeat the same command.

 

The "new" sd entries that show up are the partitions that linux sees on your NAS drive that is now in the USB enclosure.

 

Now enter the following command for each of the partitions ...

 

sudo mkdir /mnt/nasXXX (where XXX is a number for each unique partition - I used 0-6)

 

Now enter the following command for each partition ...

 

sudo mount -r -t xfs /dev/sdXXX /mnt/nasXXX (again where XXX is the number for each partition, -r is read-only mode)

 

Some of these may fail, but for the ones that work do the following command ...

 

ls /mnt/nasXXX

 

When you find the partition that has the entry "share" in it, you have found the data partition.

 

Now under the "Places" tab in Ubuntu, go to "Filesystem" (on the left hand side).  Then double click on the "mnt" folder, then double click on the "nasXXX" folder where you found the share folder.  Then double click on the Share folder and there you are - all the folders from your NAS should be right there!  Now you can copy them over to the drive on your PC, another USB drive, wherever you want!  I was able to save everything.  Hope this helps someone out, it's very frustrating and hard to believe that Buffalo can't offer this simple solution. 

 

If you don't have a PC with Ubuntu installed, you might try creating an Ubuntu "Live" CD, boot off of that, and see if this will still work (I honestly have no idea if it will as I don't know if the Live CD would come with all the drivers, etc. that a full Ubuntu install would have).  If it doesn't, it might not be a bad idea to try to set a PC up as dual boot.  I set all mine up that way since my kids were constantly infecting my windoze boxes with every horrible virus imaginable.  They now surf the internet with little fear of catching viruses on Ubuntu!  I don't have to spend countless hours/days/weeks trying to rid my 'puters of viruses anymore (now I just have to spend hours trying to recover data off my dead Buffalo NAS - heh).

 

BEB

 

Oops, almost forgot, to unmount use the umount command in linux ...

For help use man command_name in linux ...

 

[jondonnis]

I had to do something siimlar with my LS-500GL but Ubuntu just auto detected it.  I'm running a VM of Ubuntu.  How do you get the data from Ubuntu into Windows would be the next step?

[beb319]

Not sure with VM, but what I did was just create a Linkstation recovery folder on my Windows filesystem and copied it directly into there while having the NAS drive mounted in Ubuntu via my USB/SATA enclosure.  Since my system was setup for dual boot, Ubuntu can see my Windows filesystem.  So it's there in Windows when I copy it while in Ubuntu.  I would think while in a VM you'd still be able to see the Windows filesystem?