Trying to fix a NAS

[Atty]

I have a Western Digital network hard drive. It recently stopped showing files that I know were still on there and that it has allocated space for.

Today I took apart the NAS (its out of warranty, I don't care anymore) and put the raw drive into my PC to run chkdsk.

Plugged it in, power cable and SATA cable, Windows Vista reads it (for some reason my Windows 7 install won't boot and I don't care enough to fix it right now), but it doesn't show up in 'My Computer'.

I can only see it in Device Manager and in my Bios but I can't run chkdsk on it without it having a drive letter (can I?)

Halp. 🙁

 

[BoT]

if you can see it in the device manager you can assign a drive letter to it by right clicking on the drive

 

[Atty]

Where? There is no option for that and in all the option menus there is nothing that shows I can do that. :-|

Trying to force Chkdsk to run on a drive that isn't listed (presuming its E/D/F/etc, anything but the only drive registered which is C) gives me the error, "Cannon open volume for direct access."

Diskeeper doesn't see it either.


E: Wow, first BSOD I've gotten since my 8800GTS came in fried, which was like 3 years ago. :-|

 

[Mark R]

Low end NAS units typically run Linux, which means the drive will be formatted in a linux format.

There are some linux file-system drivers available for Windows - but I've never been able to make them work.

You should try connecting the drive to a PC running linux, or booting your PC from a 'Linux Live CD', and seeing if the drive can be accessed.

 

[Atty]

Oh god Linux, I hate Linux. Only because I hate change. 😛

I'll try that another day, I don't have time for all that tonight. Work in the morning.

 

[BoT]

try Hiren's BootCD
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

it comes with Paragon which also mounts ext2 and ext3 partitions
hopefully it's one of those but linux has many flavors for file systems

 

[Nothinman]

I wouldn't trust the Paragon drivers if you suspect filesystem errors, mounting them and writing to them without first running a fsck is dangerous at best and I don't know if Hiren's CD includes fsck tools to check the filesystems. A Linux LiveCD is your best bet as it will come with modules for virtually every modern filesystem out there so even if it is FAT or NTFS you'll still be able to mount it even if Windows won't touch it.