OCPC Repair

I purchased a 320GB Maxtor Shared Storage II similar to this one a little over a year ago. My main reasons for the purchase was because it had 10/100/1000 gigabit Ethernet RJ-45 port connection. One day I decided to turn the device off to conserve on energy and the next day it wouldn’t turn on. The device had 3 blinking amber lights. I visited the Seagate forums and it indicates my hard disc is bad. My warranty had run out and they did not provide any free services for data recovery.

I visited the OpenMSS forums and found that I could recover some data by editing Hex codes and adjusting offsets from the boot sector. Needless to says, it wasn’t really fruitful for me. Then I read a comment about using OpenSuse to access the reiserfs. Since I didn’t have an extra PC lying around, I could not verify. I did have a Ubuntu virtual machine that use for testing. The end result: success. In hindsight I think it wasn’t a hard disc failure, since I was able to remove the hard disc and reuse it. The enclosure on the other hand, I tossed.

Below are the steps I used to recover my data from a Windows XP host.
You’ll need:
Host OS: Windows XP
Virtual Machine: Linux OS (I’m using Ubuntu with SSH server)
You can also go to VMWare’s website and select a pre-configured Linux OS by visiting this link VMWare Appliance.
VMWare (Workstation or Server should work)
WinSCP

Step 1
Physically attach your hard drive to your host PC. The MSSII hard drive I have has an SATA interface so I had to physically attach it to my mainboard.

Step 2
Launch VMWare Workstation or VMWare Server. Edit your virtual machine settings by selecting the “Edit virtual machine settings” command.

Step 3
Select the “Add” button from the Hardware settings.

Step 4
Select “Hard Disk” from the Hardware types and hit the “Next” button

Step 5
On the Add Hardware Wizard select “Use a physical disk (for advanced users) and hit the “Next” button.

Step 6
Use the default name the Wizard gives you for the disk file and hit “Finish”.

Step 7
Verify that you now have an attached physical drive. Also notice I selected “NAT” as the Ethernet option.

Step 8
To view the attached physical drive in Ubuntu from the default menu select “Places” an on the drop-down you should see the drive.

Step 9
If you attached the wrong drive it won’t mount. Simply repeat steps 2 – 8 until it mounts.

Step 10
As you can see the biggest partition on this drive is 318.8GB my MSSII is 320GB.

Step 11
When Ubuntu mounts a device it places an icon on your desktop.

Step 12
Double click the icon and you should see a familiar site. I placed most of my shared stuff into the public directory.

Step 13
Just verify that all the data is present.

Step 14
Once you are done verifying, you want to know the path of where the device is mounted and the IP address of your virtual machine. Right click the icon on your desktop and view the properties. This will tell you the path of the mounted device. From the “System” menu select “Terminal” and type “ifconfig” (without the quotes) at the command line. It will give you an IP address of your virtual machine.

Step 15
Launch WinSCP select “New”

Step 16
Input the IP address of your virtual machine (from step 14) as the “Host name” make sure you’re on port 22. The user name and password are optional in WinSCP, but you will need to input that information when prompted.

Step 17
If you successfully logged in you should reach the home directory for the user name you provided. If you did not login successfully check and make sure you have the correct login information or that OpenSSH server has been installed on your Ubuntu. To install OpenSSH type “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install openssh-server” (without the quotes).

Step 18
Use the parent directory icon to navigate to the path of your mounted device in Step 14.

Step 19
To copy either click and drag. If that doesn’t work, select the folders you want to copy right click and select copy.