Having my two 250GB Iomega Storcenter NAS Drive set up in mirrored Raid configuration, I foolishly believed my data was completely protected.

What I hadn't considered was what would happen if there was a failure of the housing electronics, leaving the two hard drives sound but with no way to access them.

Recently my Iomega Storcenter developed a fault leaving it inaccessible. The problem was how I was to recover my files. Believing the two hard drives were sound, I removed them from the case (Iomega doesn't recommend or make it easy to do this).

I then connected the drives up to a spare PC, but Windows could not see them. Power Quest's Partition Magic showed the disks as sound, but unallocated. I believe if I tried to allocate them I would most likely lose the data.

I contacted Iomega support to find out how to recover my files, but no reply has been received to date, which is very disappointing.

After some research on the internet, I found that most Nas drives use Linux ext-2 file systems, which are clearly not directly accessible with a Windows PC. There is some software available to make ext-2 disks accessible to Windows, but I could not get it to work.

Two further possibilities have occurred to me. If I had a second Nas drive that used ext-2 file system I could temporarily put my two healthy drives in and recover the files. Alternatively I could use an old PC, install Linux on it and then get to my files that way.

Please, could PCW produce an article on how to recover files from Nas drives that use ext-2 file system?

Richard Jones