Sata hard drive problems

**pmedia** · 09-09-2009, 12:53 AM

Newbie so please bear with me. Had a buffalo linkstation( 2 drives set up as raid 1), the controller went bad on the linkstation and buffalo claimed I could retrieve the data with knoppix, so i removed the drives from the buffalo, disconnected my pc harddrive and connected one of the buffalo drives to my sata connection of the motherboard. Booted up with the knoppix cd but it does not show my harddrive on the desktop , only my cd drives. Knoppix does not find it when loading either. the drive appears correctly in bios. The only icons on the desktop are my 2 cd drives( neither of which are the hard drive, I clicked on them to be sure.) Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

**Harry Kuhman** · 09-09-2009, 01:09 AM

Originally Posted by pmedia

.....( 2 drives set up as raid 1), ... buffalo claimed I could retrieve the data with knoppix, ....

Well, your chances of recovering data from a RAID 1 array is a lot better than with the unfortunate RAID 0 arrays that we usually hear about, as the files should exist completely on either disk. But if the partitions are not showing up and you can't see the files in file manager, then it may well be that these buffalo people do some strange structuring of their data to support the RAID system and it just doesn't look like a notmal partition to Linux. I've never heard of any details of a buffalo RAID system, maybe someone else here can help you with it, but in the meantime, since you seem to be getting some feedback from buffalo support, why not ask them? Also, have you tried attaching a single one of the drives as an additional drive to an XP system and see if XP can see a partition out there with files on it? If it's not a normal Windows type partition to Windows then it seems unlikely that Knoppix will be able to read it either (unless this RAID system uses some type of Linux partitions).

**pmedia** · 09-09-2009, 02:06 AM

thanks, the file system is xfs which buffalo said is a unix file system. Unfortunately they are not much help with the preserving the data, they just want to send me a new drive.

**Harry Kuhman** · 09-09-2009, 02:12 AM

Originally Posted by pmedia

thanks, the file system is xfs which buffalo said is a unix file system. Unfortunately they are not much help with the preserving the data, they just want to send me a new drive.

I'm not sure if xfs support is in Knoppix, but I do expect the Linux heavyweight users to know. Hopefully one of them will post back now that you have identified the file system. If not perhaps they can suggest an alternate live CD that will support the need.

**Lucien** · 09-09-2009, 10:21 AM

Knoppix has support for the xfs file system.
To be sure that your CD has it ,check with commands :

"man xfs_check" or "man xfs_repair"

However I have no experience with this file system.

Luke