I’m having a big problem with my Lacie NAS 1TB drive, which doesn’t seem to read any files at all – I can’t even get a connection to it. Now I have disassembled it and it and tried to put it into my computer using a free SATA port. The only place I can see the drive though is under Computer Management -> Disk Management. There seems to be a total of 7 partitions on the HDD with one of them being 930GB in size (which seems to be the one where all my data is located). Windows (Win7) tells me though that there is 100% free space available – which doesn’t seem right.
How can I possibly recover my data from this drive?
What Filesystem is Lacie using?
Thank you so much for your help?
My shot is that, as with most NAS, it uses Linux Ext3 file system. If this is true, you should NOT do anything with it under Windows. You can’t fix it from there and you surely can make things much worse (a good example is a system that claims that disk or partition full of data is empty).
My suggestion would be to either connect this disk to a computer having Linux system and try many disk-repair tools available there. Or you can try any disk-repair tool available (even Windows version), if it offers an option of creating bootable CD with repair tools and accessing your damaged disk only from there (after system restart). Do nothing under Windows!
Names (programs, tools and pieces of software) you may consider includes: “Acronis True Image Home”, “Easeus Partition Master”, “Partition Recovery” and “PowerQuest Drive Image”. This is for programs offering (or not) bootable version. You may also consider “Clonezilla Live”, “Hiren’s BootCD”, “gParted Live CD” and similar.
I had similar issue on my QNAP TS-210 and choose the risky way. That was: do nothing with the disk and reinstall the NAS system (firmware) from scratch. It worked like a charm, though I was warned many times during that process, that I can lost all my data, so it was a little bit like a heartbreak hour, waiting to see, if I have anything left out of my 2,2 TB of data! :]