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dekkit's avatar
dekkit
Aspirant
Nov 10, 2009

ReadyNAS Data Recovery - VMware recovery tool

Description
This topic contains links to linux VMware images (Debian / Ubuntu) that have been modified to enable you to access your ReadyNAS duo HDDs from any machine with a USB plug and a SATA to USB cable.

Advantages:
* VMware player be downloaded freely
* Can run in both existing linux / MS Windows (XP,Vista etc) operating system without any further modification

Disadvantages:
* Requires a SATA to USB cable
* Mac users will need to find another program to run the VMware files

Background
At some point your ReadyNAS Duo unit is going to stop working (which hopefully will be long and far into in the future) and there may be a point where you'll need to rely on your external backups.

While it's a good strategy to ensure you (and your family / clients) have a good disaster recovery process (having external off-site backups, checking the backups, knowing how to restore from backups etc), in some cases the backups might not work or the backups aren't available to you.

Due to the architecture of the ReadyNAS Duo (more specifically the 16KB blocksize of the partitions), you cannot simply pull out the hard disks, place them into a standard windows / linux pc, then copy all your files across to another computer or storage device.

Unfortunately there are no windows drivers that can properly access the drives and the process to configure a linux pc is complex (see viewtopic.php?f=25&t=24861&hilit=16+blocksize for further background on this)

The following VMware images contain all required patches to read your HDDs in linux just by entering a few terminal commands.

VMplayer Link

To get started, you will need to download a version of VMplayer for your operating system Win/Linux (Mac not directly supported yet), this can be found
http://www.vmware.com/products/player/


VMware Linux Image with Ext2Fuse

acmtn Debian release - tested ok, reports are that it works fine except for files greater than 4GB)
http://www.readynas.com/contributed/dek ... ebian5.zip
acmtn VM login info (username/password): root/rootadmin, vmuser/vmuser1
(please read the forums for more details on how to use this vmware )

_vito Ubuntu release - currently being tested, enables you to use the HDDs directly plugged into your pc without the need for a SATA to usb cable.
http://www.readynas.com/contributed/dek ... buntu9.rar

Details on this alternative vmware can be found on this post (you'll need to review the instructions carefully):
viewtopic.php?p=203653#p203653


dekkit Debian release - tested, a number of issues.
my initial attempt that helped start this thread has been found to have quite a few issues and may not work for you, but can be found here if you would like to try:
http://www.readynas.com/contributed/dekkit/VMwareDebian5.0%20-%20ext2Fuse.rar
dekkit VM login info: User: vmplanet pass: vmplanet.net

the acmtn version at this stage appears to be getting more reliable results for users. Unfortunately, I have not had time improve on my original dekkit release due to time constraints but if you would like to try please post your results.

Dekkit release Notes:
* You will need 8GB of free disk space once you have uncompressed the image
* You will still need to execute some of the terminal commands to mount the drive (take precaution so you don't accidently blow away your data)
* This VMware can access other windows file shares and can also be configured to host windows shares (see the docs for debian for more info on this)
* To uncompress the file use WinRar: http://download.cnet.com/WinRAR-32-bit/ ... 07677.html or for non-windows platforms try: http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm
* This image is a work in progress (WIP) so please post all errrors !!!!!.


Dekkit release Usage- this may apply to the other versions (eg acmtn
Login to the OS

Access the terminal and enter the following once the HDD has been attached (take note that your /dev/c may differ):

modprobe fuse
vgscan
vgchange -ay c
mkdir /mnt/lvm
ext2fuse /dev/c/c /mnt/lvm
there is a delay in output but then ..
"/dev/c/c is to be mounted at /mnt/lvm
fuse-ext2 initialized for device: /dev/c/c
block size is 16384"



Dekkit Release Acknowledgements
The original VMware image was found http://www.vmplanet.net/node/85 (before the various patches were applied - so feel free to drop them a donation), if you can improve this image by way of a script to make it even easier to use for us 'non-linux users' then please do so and share it back with the rest of us

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