On the subject of the failed NAS enclosure (PCW January 2007, Letters), I am a Linux user and my system allows me to look into the guts of small Nas drives.

In general terms they have two partitions, a small 100MB or so primary ext2 partition, which contains the embedded Linux OS and a major storage partition. Normally the larger partition is able to be formatted to ext2 or ext3, ReiserFS, Fat32 or even NTFS - Fat32, while not as good as NTFS, is transparent to most other operating systems.

I would suggest to the owner of the failed drives that rather than going to the trouble of installing a Linux distro, he should use a Linux Live CD - the prime choices being Knoppix (the KDE desktop looks pretty much like Windows) or Puppy (the file manager looks a bit odd but is understandable). Either will allow copying to a USB key and Knoppix also offers CD writing with a pretty simple interface.

QT Parted (partition manager on Knoppix) will tell you what format has been used on the drive and, if you use it via the command line in Konsole by typing 'sudo qtparted', will allow formatting of the partitions - be careful!

James Baldwin