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Trying to brush up on my general understanding of hard drives and partitions...

I have an old SATA hard drive with a load of stuff on it. As far as I'm aware it wasn't the OS's boot drive before I yanked it out of its bay and sold the computer. The fact that it wasn't used to boot the OS means it can be accessed via another OS on another machine (need clarification on this?).

I've recently bought a Synology NAS. Is it possible for me to spin the said old hard drive within the NAS, and grab some old files off of it (before I plonk my WD Red's in there more permanently?).

I've not attempted it yet, but I don't want to spend hours tiptoeing around an unfamiliar system if it simply can't be done.

One worry is that the NAS will ask me to format the drive before installing...

Further Clarification

After a bit of soul searching I can sum up the question better:

Is it possible to put an old hard drive into a Synology NAS without formatting it? Or does the Synology OS (I imagine: some flavour of Linux) require a formatting procedure in order to mount the drive to the network?

The fact that most OS's are able to at least read from multiple filesystems (Fat32/NTFS/HFS+), surely means it would be possible to just mount a disk to the network through the Synology NAS? I only need to temporarily grab some stuff from the disk, not make use of the rich feature set offered by the NAS.

3 Answers 3

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The easiest way to read the disk is to attach it to your regular machine (Desktop, Laptop, does not matter). There are too many things to consider when trying to access the disk from within the NAS and to be sure that it does not modify the data in any way.

The fact that it wasn't used to boot the OS means it can be accessed via another OS on another machine (need clarification on this?)

The fact, that a machine uses a disk to read it's boot data from it does not matter at all. All you need to access the data on the disk is .. the disk. (This is true for any storage medium)

The data is put onto the disk in a structured manner. This is usually called "the filesystem". If you know the filesystem you can extract the data, allthough slowly. If OS xyz knows how to read from the filesystem it can extract the data. If your Synology NAS knows the filesystem of the disk in question AND is able to mount it .. then your NAS will read the data.

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  • I don't own a desktop machine: hence needing to use the NAS. The reason I mentioned that the disk was not used to boot an OS is that I figured these disks (or partitions) sandboxed the folder structure with their OS (cough Windows). Is that not true? Anyway, is there not a way I can use the NAS to access the disk?
    – shennan
    Feb 25, 2014 at 16:33
  • what machine do you use to access the nas?
    – akira
    Feb 25, 2014 at 16:54
  • I use a hipster book pro retina... As I said, I haven't set up the NAS with my brand spanking new WD Red's yet because I wanted to perform a rescue of old data from this old hard drive (not damaged/broken as far as I know) before I get settled in. Any advice on best way to do this without having to spend any more money?
    – shennan
    Feb 25, 2014 at 17:03
  • replace "desktop" with "your computer". MacBook, desktop, does not matter. install a virtual machine (VMware Fusion, virtual machine) to it and then you can toy around with a OS that has the Filesystem drivers you need.
    – akira
    Feb 25, 2014 at 17:07
  • Ok, I don't think I made my question clear enough. My apologies. What I'm essentially asking is: by just popping an old hard drive (one that has already been populated with files from a Windows machine two years previously) into a NAS, am I able to access it through my connecting machine? My worry is that the NAS operating system will ask me to format the drive before it can hook it up to the network? (Thanks for your time so far).
    – shennan
    Feb 25, 2014 at 17:11
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Just stumbled upon this questions while trying to solve the same issue. Here's what helped me:

Apparently, DSM does not offer a way to mount a volume from HDD without adding it to NAS. So, there's no option to have it available inside of web interface or shared via network--at least with default packages.

However, Synology is a full featured Linux computer, which allows you to do whatever you're pleased to once you connect to the shell. So, you need to:

Step 1: enable telnet access via Control Panel --> System->Terminal & SNMP->Terminal-> Check "Enable Telnet Service"

Then, you need to connect as a root via any telnet client. For me this worked this way from Mac's Terminal command line:

Step 2:

telnet 192.168.1.21
Synology login: root
Password: *your admin password*

Then you need to mount the volume. You need to find out what is it, so this is the command to help:

Step 3:

parted /dev/sdd

I got 4-bay 414play, and "sdd" is for 4th bay. "sda" is for 1st, "sdb" is for 2nd, so you get the idea. Then it will show something like this:

GNU Parted 3.1
Using /dev/sdd
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) 

Here you need to type command "print". This shows you the list of partitions:

print
Model: WDC WD10EACS-00ZJB0 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdd: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                  Flags
 1      20.5kB  210MB   210MB   fat32        EFI System Partition  boot
 2      210MB   1000GB  1000GB  hfs+         Bookshelf

(parted) 

Next thing, type "quit", and it will quit. Don't do anything else, it might have adverse consequences ;) as "parted" is actually for messing around with partition table.

So, now you got list of volumes on your hard drive, and next thing you can do is to mount it.

Step 4:

mount -t hfsplus /dev/sdd2 /volumeUSB1/

Choose the partition suitable for you (/dev/sdd2), and choose right file system--they all been shown on previous step. Now, do this...

Step 5:

ls -la /volumeUSB1/

...and see the magic (assuming all above has worked). To copy it to your NAS volume, figure out where to put it on your network shared folders. I.e. if you want to put files to default "NetBackup" folder, do this:

Step 6:

cp -r /volumeUSB1/ /volume1/NetBackup/

The "-r" flag means recursive. It will take some time, it won't be interactive--soo just watch files appearing in web interface until it's done.

Hope this would help.

P.S. And don't forget to turn telnet access off, it's not so secure.

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    Shared from elsewhere: if the partition is NTFS, use a command like "ntfs-3g /dev/NTFS_VOLUME /tmp/DESTINATION" to mount it.
    – Syzygy
    Dec 5, 2017 at 21:08
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I am now exactly in the same situation: I want to use a few old hard drives, which happen to be of the same size, to set up a RAID in my newly bought Synology DS414 NAS. The data on the first HDD could be deleted, so I just installed and formatted it. However with other HDDs I need to move data from them to the NAS first.

One of the hard drives is in the form of an external 3.5" USB2/eSATA hard drive. I've opened the casing and took the HDD out. Now I have a USB/eSATA cage and can use it to connect both 2.5 and 3.5 inch disks to my laptop or to the NAS.

Connection to NAS is like this: Notebook → WiFi → Gigabit Ethernet/WiFi router → PowerLine adapter → Fast Ethernet → DS 414.

I've done some experimenting.

  1. HDD in the cage connected with eSATA cable to my laptop. NAS is accessed via Windows file explorer on the notebook. File copying goes at the speed of 6 MB/s.
  2. HDD connected to NAS via USB2. NAS is accessed via Windows file explorer on the notebook. Files are moved in Windows, from HDD to NAS (both can be seen under Network>DS414). Speed: 2.2 MB/s.
  3. Same connection, files are moved using DSM File Station. Speed: 24 MB/s.
  4. Took the HDD and inserted it into the NAS. DS414 refused to see its content, so I could only format it.

I did not try: connecting NAS to the router (to achieve Gigabit Ethernet speed + eSATA). However, in my experience, Windows is very slow in copying hundreds of files just because it somehow addresses them one after another. It takes forever even if the files are small.

Summary: in my case, copying via USB2 using Synology operating system, was the fastest way to move files from a populated HDD to the NAS.

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