So my NAS200 died and I have all my pics and music stored on it I hadn't set up another back up option even though I had another network storage, DNS323, sitting on the shelf, I know very stupid of me!

The NAS200 was running Raid 1 and as it is a hardware failure I am stuck with files I can not read. It appears the NAS200 used a linux file system so here I go back iinto the linux world, it has been 20+ years since I touched it.

Anyone with some tips on using Ubuntu Livecd or another solution to get my files off the hdd?

The Ubuntu live CD may automatically see the HD, and give you an icon for it on the desktop. If you have another formatted drive, like for Windows, you should be able to copy everything over to it with drag and drop.

I use Linux every day, Ubuntu in fact, and within the last couple months even used it to recover about a terabyte of data from a failing drive.

I'm headed out for the evening, but if you need any help post here. I, or someone else, should be able to walk you through what ever you need.

Do you know what exactly failed? Is it the controller, the network port, one of the drives?

I think it is just the disk controller as neither drive shows up, no lights on the panel to indicate a drive is installed and the web user interface shows no drives installed as well. I had been having drive issues for the past 6 months, 2 dead drives(or maybe not?) which I sent back under warranty. More recently I was having read issues and now finally I can only access the web interface and menu but nothing on the drives themselves.

You're scaring me. I really need to back up my media and documents.

That is generally a good idea.

Scary is when the applications you run on the shop floor start disappearing from your server and you're not sure the automatic backups have been running properly.

Transfering files over to my usb hdd right now. I had to force the mounting of the raid drive from the NAS in order for it to get mounted and thus allowing me to access it.

On a side note I really like Ubuntu, once I got into the proper syntax etc, but for general daily use I think it is similar enough to any other GUI to use. I am not sure I could convince my wife to run it instead of windows though.

I didn't have the patience to learn it when I installed it briefly on my last computer. I should give it another go sometime.

I never really learned much of it either just enough to get this done. The fact I had to force the drive to mount was the point that made me look up the programming terminolgy and I only looked for the drive specifics. I found one example in the Ubuntu forum that was very helpful for doing this.

Just another hour or so and the drive should be copied to the external back up as long as I don't copy my music file over. I am tempted to just rip them all again and use AAC lossless for all the iPods I have in the house and with the DNS 323 acting as the iTunes server this should make it easier for my wife to access all of our music, I think I just talked myself into it. I guess I have some ripping to do this month.

Jay the Ripper.

And setting up a back up!

I just did that with all of my CDs. If you can get your hands on more CD/DVD drives, it helps... Not that I've backed up this massive store of music, nor have I moved it onto a computer that connects to the iPods!

Back up, back up and one more back up, just for good measure.

Oh wait, I meant I just ripped everything as ALAC. I have everything as AAC/MP3 on a pair of 750GB external drives.

Jay, just ran across this thread looking for something else. I'm glad you got your disks back up and spinning.

In case this helps anybody else out, the following freeware tool lets Windows users read linux disks:

http://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/

I also have a DNS-323 and just to see if it worked, I pulled one of the RAID1 disks out, put it into an enclosure and could read it no problem on my WXP machine with that app. I am mostly comfortable with RAID1 level of protection but was worried about the single point of failure in the controller card. This helps me feel a bit better about that too.

Thanks for that link. My NAS always has issues recovering the file system when shut down ungracefully and I’m not runny any Linux boxes right now so that utility looks nice.