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I posted this question on Stack Overflow but was told to ask this here instead, so after creating yet another login/account here I am, and apologies if this looks like spam/crosas-posting.

An old Netgear ReadyNAS has developed problems with the first disk - marked as "dead".

The ReadyNAS boots up with just he 2nd disk in. Trying to back this up prior to repair/rebuild/restore is proving an issue because over the network this is too slow.

Having had a similar issue with a Buffalo TS a while back, I decided to try the same which was to attached the disk via SATA to a Linux machine and use the volume manager to get the data.

This didn't with the REadyNAs as the Linux host is old and doesn't have "fuse" and "extfuse2", and using "yast" (SUSE 10.1) is rather tiresome.

Then I found this:

http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=35153&start=0

Which suggested downloading a pre-canned VM which had all the necessary modules installed. I downloaded the debian on. I am running VMWare workstation 6.5 on Windows 7 host.

The instructions state start the vm, attached the device (through SATA to USB), then run the commands:

modprobe fuse
vgscan 
vgchange -ay c
mkdir /mnt/lvm
ext2fuse /dev/c/c /mnt/lvm

The problem I have is with the vgchangeay c, as that gives "Volume group c not found".

I looked around for the disk, and the only place I can find it is under /dev/disk.

But If I try to mount these devices I get

 fuseext2 -o ro -o sync_read /dev/disk/by-id/usb-ST310005_28AS_2222960B9E22-0\:0 /mnt/f1
Open_ext2 Error:2133571347

Using fdisk -l I (think I) can see the USB disk as "/dev/sdb" but without any partition info:

fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table

There must be a way to get at the data under Linux.

So, I can see the disk but there aren't any partitions that an be seen.

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2 Answers 2

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If the partition table is good on Disk 1 and can be cloned then you could do that and then mount disk 2 using the procedure you tried.

However if you get this wrong you could make the problem worse. I would suggest cloning disk 2 before attempting something like that.

Our newer models are faster, use distributed parity rather than a dedicated parity disk and have a simpler procedure for mounting arrays in an ordinary x86 Linux machine.

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Disk 2 is the parity disk so it appears to be blank to your PC when it isn't.

You should put the disk back in the NAS and transfer the data across your network.

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  • Sure, putting the disk in the NAS does reveal the data, but as I said above backing it up over the network is too slow - this readyNAS was never very fast. So are you saying with just the parity disk there is no way to mount it under Linux?
    – TenG
    Sep 19, 2014 at 14:09

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