For most ICT professionals, computers and related media are just means of production, not the meaning themselves. In the middle of a complicated midnight operation, imagine that your external storage starts ticking off as it tries to tell you that something is going wrong. This would embitter you as it raises doubts that your whole valuable data might be vanishing in front of your eyes, or they’ve already left the place. I know how it is depressing to leave the current work and face a hard disk issue out of the blue. But when this takes place, it means that you’ll run after your storage media in a panic to rescue your data especially if you’re not synchronizing them into another location periodically.

Couple of things that you will try to fix the surprise is probably going to be rebooting or trying to logon to management interface to see what is going on there if your HD is a NAS type device like Lacie ,etc. But when you somehow succeeded to access the media you may encounter that the file system had turned into RAW and you can’t access the data itself any more. In such case, most probably you’ll find yourself digging relevant forums to find someone else that got through similar situation successfully. Paid data recovery services or softwares will likely be the other prospects at the bottom of your list.

If your hard drive hasn’t been battered by the mechanical causes, below shall be the solution to get back your data as easy as winking.

If you’re at least slightly familiar with computer hardwares and not heeding the warranty seal; open the enclosure, disjoin the ethernet card and power button switch to detach your disk drive. Attach it directly to your PC. Use a spare SATA/IDE cable rather than the one used inside NAS device if possible. Visit http://www.ubuntu.com and download the latest version. Burn it to a CD/DVD media and reboot your machine. Boot your PC with Ubuntu and make your selection on Language Screen when it appears. Select “Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer“, wait while Ubuntu loads from your CD/DVD media. It will take a while as it reads the necessary files from the removable media. When the desktop shows up, go to “Places” menu and mount your problematic disk by selecting it from the drop-down list.

You may notice bunch of smaller ext2/ext3 type FS partitions on the same list which are possibly OS slices for your NAS device. It will be placed on desktop when your disk is mounted. That’s that! You shall be entirely displaying your files and folders. Copy or move them into a safe NTFS or FAT32 partition which you can mount via exactly the same method. If your data is oversized and you don’t have enough space among the existing local disk places then you can connect and draw upon a USB hard disk or you may follow System -> Preferences -> Network Connections menus to configure your ethernet ipv4 settings in order to access your Windows shares or another network places via “Connect to Server” menu again under “Places”.

You may right click and format your drive on desktop in whatever format you wish right after you’re finished with it.

I haven’t tried it but I suppose this method may provide a recovery for disks that turned into RAW in storage arrays or virtual platforms. Let’s see if someone who carried out such a case will comment on this ?

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