I have had this 1TB external network HDD for about 2 and a half years as my backup drive with no real issues, until recently. It first disappeared from my network, then found itself again. It did this a few times and now it won't turn on. The HDD itself was still powering up, so in these situations you can normally take the HDD from the caddy and problem solved. I did this and although Windows installed a driver for the HDD, it did not show up on My Computer. I thought this was odd, so I then went into Disk Management and the drive was there in about 4 partitions (which I had not made) but Windows had not assigned any drive letters. At this stage I thought I would not go any further and get googling. It turns out that this is a common fault with these units, and it then gets very complicated. These drives run a built in Linux based OS which then emulates NTFS for Windows use. I was completely oblivious to this, I just thought it was a normal external HDD but with an ethernet port. So all my data is in Linux format I haven't a clue about Linux but I think it said it was XFS formatted and a ext3 file system. This is now where I am stuck as to what to do next. I have read some people using Linux based Live CD's to rescue the data, but I have never used Linux before so I am reluctant to do anything at this stage. Anybody dealt with these drives before? Does it make sense to any Linux users? Help! Thanks in advance
Thanks for the link. Explore2fs shows me that the data is still on the HDD. Is it read only or is it safe to transfer the data with this software?
I tried with some less important files, it seems to work ok. Will move on to the important stuff soon! Thank you.....and have some rep!