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Forum Discussion
Accessing USB drive with Linux
I have a NV+ with external USB drive formatted in EXT3 where backup is copied to this drive. Power supply crapped out in NV+. :-( Plugged the USB drive into a Linux system (Fedora 9) which should...
Oh... crap... this is a showstopper. (EDIT: Not so much, turns out. FUSE with fuse-ext2 works on Mac OS X and Linux to access ext3 filesystems with 16K blocks. See below for details.)
From forum post "Restore via Linux fails" (viewtopic.php?p=112519#p112519):
My external's ext3 filesystem definitely uses the 16K block size. From the output of dmesg following mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/tmp on a Linux PC:
Welp, I guess that's that. If you have access to an IA64, Sparc, Alpha, or another ReadyNAS handy (and possibly a newer Mac, possibly using MacFUSE and fuse-ext2), you might have a chance at reading off the data. Using fuse-ext2 with FUSE on Linux is also rumored to work, but I'm skeptical. (I'll follow up here if the Linux or Mac FUSE + fuse-ext2 actually works.) I guess the lesson learned here is to format the external using another Linux machine (to ensure the "least common denominator" 4K block size) before plugging it into the ReadyNAS and using it for backups--if you want it to be accessible from other machine architectures.
From what I gather reading the other ReadyNAS forums posts, 16K block size (supported by the Sparc ReadyNASes, like my NV+) became the default with RAIDiator 2.6 Linux kernels due to performance issues at 4K. So there's a possibility that either 4K will come back as an option in a later kernel, or else the Linux kernel will learn to deal with large block sizes irrespective of the machine architecture (patches for 2.6.2x kernels are mentioned here).
Other potentially useful resources on the interwebs:
From forum post "Restore via Linux fails" (viewtopic.php?p=112519#p112519):
That means the data volume was created using RAIDiator 4 with a 16KB block size, and PCs can only handle 4KB. So that filesystem can only be mounted on architectures with a >=16KB page size. x86 won't cut it.
My external's ext3 filesystem definitely uses the 16K block size. From the output of dmesg following mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/tmp on a Linux PC:
EXT3-fs: bad blocksize 16384.
Welp, I guess that's that. If you have access to an IA64, Sparc, Alpha, or another ReadyNAS handy (and possibly a newer Mac, possibly using MacFUSE and fuse-ext2), you might have a chance at reading off the data. Using fuse-ext2 with FUSE on Linux is also rumored to work, but I'm skeptical. (I'll follow up here if the Linux or Mac FUSE + fuse-ext2 actually works.) I guess the lesson learned here is to format the external using another Linux machine (to ensure the "least common denominator" 4K block size) before plugging it into the ReadyNAS and using it for backups--if you want it to be accessible from other machine architectures.
From what I gather reading the other ReadyNAS forums posts, 16K block size (supported by the Sparc ReadyNASes, like my NV+) became the default with RAIDiator 2.6 Linux kernels due to performance issues at 4K. So there's a possibility that either 4K will come back as an option in a later kernel, or else the Linux kernel will learn to deal with large block sizes irrespective of the machine architecture (patches for 2.6.2x kernels are mentioned here).
Other potentially useful resources on the interwebs:
- ReadyNAS forums: V4.1.5 Radiator - any chance 4K block size will return?
- serverfault.com: How do I mount ext2 or ext3 filesystems on OSX?
- serverfault.com: Mount an ext3 partition with a 16k blocksize?
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