Linkstation Live sudden death

[Simon]

   Hello all,

For the last 6 months I have had a HS-DH500DL running on a small home network with no issues.  The device has several mapped drives configured, containing a mixture of music, pictures and documents.  This morning the most regularly used PC on the network was complaining that it could not reconnect to all network drives.  Further investigation found the following:

• All previously mapped drives from the Linkstation have disappeared.

• The device can be found in the 'NASNavigator2' application, and shows the correct description and IP details, together with the correct calculation of 60% of available hard disk space is used.

• Browsing the available shares within NASNavigator2 shows two shares, neither of which existed previously- 'info' and 'printers.'

• Cannot connect to web admin interface.

 

• Device in 'EM Mode.'

 

After reading several posts on this forum, I successfully completed a firmware update to version 2.11, and this is now reported in NASNavigator2.  No change in behaviour from the unit was noted.

 

I then attempted the TFTP boot recovery route, as detailed in this post: http://forums.buffalotech.com/buffalo/board/message?message.uid=8534" target="_blank">http://forums.buffalotech.com/buffalo/board/message?message.uid=8534

The program does not appear to respond, and I am unsure if the unit is actually booting back into EM Mode- after waiting a good ten minutes the program still displays 'awaiting requests,' and never acknowledges with 'blocks served.'

 

I was hoping that if I could regain access to the web admin facility I could hopefully reassign the shares and recover my data, but no joy.

I am now unsure how I am to proceed, the loss of the unit is a secondary concern compared to the data stored within it, so I would be extremely grateful for any help and advice.  It is also worth mentioning that the unit had an additional hard drive connected to it via USB performing nightly backups, but obviously I cannot connect this directly to my PC as it is XFS.  Is there an easier way to recover the data off this drive as opposed to tackling the Linkstation?

 

Big thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

 

Simon.

[Simon]

   Unfortunately I've not managed to progress any further with this. 

Some further time spent with Google seems to suggest that XFS drives can be accessed via a Windows based PC with the aid of VMware and a non-specific variant of Linux, when used with a FAT32 partition.

If I was to try this with the secondary drive that was connected to the Linkstation via USB which performed nightly backups, am I likely to get any positive results?  Are the drives locked/encrypted when initially used with the Linkstation? If this is the case, is there a way around it?

As before, all suggestions and advice is hugely appreciated.

 

Simon.