I hold no love for NAS drives, often with very specific software and hardware setups. One just device – a Netgear Nas – died in the office. Instead of pulling the data from the backup, I thought it was worth trying to get the drives working in an old PC to recover the latest data.

This particular model of NAS uses EXT3 LVM as a file system. Great news if you’ve got a Linux live DVD lying around (almost). So Netgear Nas boxes tend to run on non-standard hardware, making the block sizes 16 instead of 4. This means it won’t mount without some extra hacking.

• Start by becoming root on your live distro
  sudo su
• Next, install fuse EXT2 in order to allow fuse to mount ext2 file systems
  apt-get install fuseext2
• Install LVM2 if it’s not already installed. This will be needed to manage the lvm used by the NAS
  apt-get install lvm2
• Check to see if the fuse module is loaded after intstallation
  modprobe fuse
• The next series of commands will check the lvm drives and set them as active
  vgscan
vgchange -ay c
• If you’ve not done so already, create a directory to mount the drive to
  mkdir /mnt/nas
• Hopefully by this point you got messages indicating the drive was ready. this uses /dev/c/c/ as the Netgear NAS drive in it’s LVM volume, and /mnt/nas as the mountpoint
  fuseext2 -o ro -o sync_read /dev/c/c /mnt/nas

Tra da! you should be able to navigate to the directory and pull the data off. Alternatively you could install linux onto a spare PC and mount this drive, setting it up as a samba share to replace the nasty NAS.