Help with data recovery on a Netgear SC101
 

Hi,

I am trying to recover data off of a SAN File System disk from a Netgear SC101 NAS storage device. Their version of SAN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_file_system ?) is proprietary so effectively I am working with an unknown file system. Is there a way I can improve the generic configuration files for this task or is foremost already designed and ready for this operation?

Thanks in advanced for any reply!

"The SC101 is a block level device (..) The result of this is that you have to have proprietary drivers installed on Windows in order to connect to the device."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netgear_SC101)

"Their file system is DATAPLOW_ZFS (it's a modification of SAN File System, which does not need defragmentation), they are connected to a fictitious SCSI controller."
(http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/...ear-sc101.html)

"My contact at Zetera explained that SFSZ is a enterprise-class SAN file system from DataPlow (..) since the file system is self-correcting, there is no requirement for a disk check and repair utility. He also said that defragging isn't necessary because blocks are directly written to disk rather than files, which need to be arranged for good read performance."
(http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/conte.../24757/75/1/2/)


"Data recovery with SFSExtract.exe"
(http://kbserver.netgear.com/pdf/sc10...uide_sep14.pdf)

"Zetera Z-San Filesystem Within the last 18 months, Zetera, with some sort of input from Dataplow, brought out this proprietary SoIP concept (..) products using this technology have come from Netgear and Bell Microproducts in recent months."
(http://kerneltrap.org/node/6800)

"Netgear ships a clustered filesystem with the product (perhaps based on DataPlow SFS) (..) There is no protocol documentation provided, nor any driver support for operating systems other than Windows. This software allows Linux to access the the sc101 as a block device, without requiring a new kernel module."
(http://code.google.com/p/sc101-nbd/)


Never tried it. I'd rip out the disks and make 'dd' copies before doing anythign else.

Unfortunately this is for drives that can be mounted. I cannot see the drives I am trying to recover because they were privatized. When I installed the newest Vista Drivers (through the beta testing program), initially the drivers worked like a charm. It wasn't until the firmware upgrade and the utility upgrade upon the regular release that it stopped recognizing my private partitions, even though I hadn't deleted the registry keys needed.

Since the firmware upgrade has changed a lot, there is yet to be a ut_full to work with the new firmware. It's been 2 months and I NEED to get files off of these disks. That's why I am exploring foremost.

I've had regular shotgun luck with foremost already (have gotten a lot of empty word documents and unreadable jpegs. I was just curious about the block size for the file system or other subtleties.

Dunno what that means and the more I read about the SC-101 the less I wanna know.


The PDF says 8K blocks using SFS but I'm wondering if that matters since you only can access the drive (or whatever representation of data it allows you to see) over the network and through the Z-SAN virtual device driver and SCM software.


I'd still rip 'em out and make 'dd' copies before doing anything else.