ReadyNAS Data Recovery - VMware recovery tool

Looks like this thread has generated quite a bit of interest since i last visited.... here is a visual step by step guide that someone has kindly posted on their blog after doing a few google searches.

http://firstpersontroubleshooter.blogsp ... dynas.html
they also include an example on how to check if your usb hdd is being properly detected within the VMware (as mine wasn't).

While I was hoping this day would never come, it appears that I've crashed ReadyNAS duo and in recovery mode. While I turned off the RAID on my 2 disk duo (so each HDD was its own volume eg C and D), the first disk i tried appears to be too corrupted to be mounted properly up in the VMWare (doh!). The commands don't detect anything, even though within the linux vm the partion manager shows my drive and the partitions (with a nice warning flag next to both indicating things aren't quite right!)...

My next steps have been to try out Rstudio's Rtools which has so far been able to detect the files that weren't lost and should be able to pull of most of them (even though most of the stuff is backed up anyway).... just need to find a spare drive large enough to store it all on now.

I'm thinking it might have just been easier if i had just started off with an old laptop and added a few usb NTFS formatted hdds in it, particularly as a windows user - anything that can go wrong with the duo is just so time consuming to fix / rebuild ..but then again moving TBs of data around was always going to be slow.