ReadyNAS Data Recovery - VMware recovery tool

Hi,

I just wanted to say thanks to all the great suggestions in this topic and to document my experience when my power supply failed.
Firstly I have an NV (from Infrant) which I bought from eBay several years ago, then the power supply failed about 2 years ago and I contacted Netgear as it was one of the ones that there were concerns about the power supply. Despite buying from eBay, Netgear actually replaced the PSU and I was up and running again within a week.
All good until about a month ago I turned off the NV as we were going away (and disabled the power schedule) and when I came back and turned it on again, nothing :( I contacted Netgear but the response this time was that because I bought it from eBay they could not do anything (I guess it depends who picks up the support ticket), but after doing a bit of reading through topics like this one I bought a couple of power extension cables (20-pin and 4-pin) and rewired it for the NV, then using one of the PCs I have, I plugged in my adapter cable to tried to fire up the NV. This worked on the second PSU I tried (not sure why the first didn't though), but the NV was stuck in a continuous reboot cycle (not sure why it was doing that either), so I thought I would try getting the data off as I already had an NV+ v2 (again bought from eBay and 2 x 3TB disks fitted) but never configured. I tried connecting disk 1 to a USB disk caddy I had and tried LinuxReader and R-Linux but neither would see any data. So I tried attaching the drive directly to a PC and hey presto! I then spent the next three days copying data using LinuxReader at first but then R-Linux to the new NV+ v2 (both PC and NV+ v2 connected to gigabit switch). The network throughput was not as great as I had hoped, achieving at most peaks of 25% of 1Gbps. I don't know whether the bottleneck was reading from the drive, interpreting EXT3, the network, or the NAS, but anyway it is done now.
Some thoughts on the two programs, LinuxReader is good and managed to read the disks but failed on several files, I assume through the path length being too great or something. And when I tried to recopy the files to see if there was anything missing, if there were duplicate files, it simply copied the second copy as <name>_1 with no option to overwrite, skip, etc. R-Linux is a far superior program which has these options to overwrite or skip if a file already exists, and it will preserve hidden file attributes and security. But if like me you are restoring to a network location such as \\nas\media it will complain that the folder does not exist and would you like to create it, if you say yes it does actually do what it is supposed to. The other annoying thing about R-Linux is if you say skip files if they exist, it writes each entry to the log and with a maximum of 10000 lines in the log if you are copying a lot of files as I was >200,000 files the log entries will get lost so I had to do a comparison of the file directories after the copy to validate everything was copied.
I would definitely recommend R-Linux to anyone attempting to recover files from their broken NAS, it has saved my life. Now to see about repairing the PSU in my NV...