DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

I feel for you..  This has been reported here I believe as well as on the D-Link support forum.

Just curious.... facing the enclosure, which slot was your existing disk with data in (the left one or the right).  The manual is not clear about this, but the right slot is Bay 1 and the left slot is Bay 2.  People naturally tend to install their first disk in the left slot (Bay 2).

Here are some links:

http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=4724.0
http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=4765.0

I'm not a linux expert so may need some guru to weigh in.  If the drive was simply reformatted and no new data written to it, it may be possible to recover... I'm just not sure.  If the data is that important, don't do anything to the disk before an expert has weighed in on the topic.

BTW... I think that even if your first disk was installed in Bay 2 (left) and Bay 1 (right) left empty, the resulting formatted disk would still be Volume_1.  Thats a logical volume, even though the physical disk would be drive 2.

I agree that since the DNS has been on the market for several years, this bug is inexcusable and speaks volumes about the level of testing done before the firmware was released.

Last edited by jesbo (2009-04-09 23:26:48)

jesbo wrote:

BTW... I think that even if your first disk was installed in Bay 2 (left) and Bay 1 (right) left empty, the resulting formatted disk would still be Volume_1.  Thats a logical volume, even though the physical disk would be drive 2.

I agree that since the DNS has been on the market for several years, this bug is inexcusable and speaks volumes about the level of testing done before the firmware was released.

you know the weird thing that happened was that it formatted the new drive once.. but then after reboot, the light for the new drive (1tb) is flashing red. at that point i think the old drive still had its data. i thought maybe something has gone awry for the new drive, since the interface was asking for its formatting again, alongside with the red light. It's after I okayed it when things just went terribly wrong.

wondering how this has to do with anything, but yes I think it's a terrible thing that this should happen on something people are supposed to trust with their huge amounts of data. it is indeed quite deplorable, and my doubts with d-link products have come back with a nasty bite this time, after i wrote a raving review for it on Amazon too (the first one). What irony.

I think the DNS-323 is a contrary thinking device. Everyone says that the right bay is Drive 1 and the left bay is Drive 2. Drive 1 is going to become Volume 1 and Drive 2 is going to become Volume 2.

For months I ran a sole 750 GB Seagate 7200.10 in the right drive bay and it was indeed Volume 1. However, when I upgraded my disk storage I went "whole hog", so to speak and removed the 750 GB drive altogether and put in two 1.5 TB Seagate 7200.11 drives simultaneously.

Now the odd thing to me, in contrast to what I have read on these forums and elsewhere, after the formatting of the drives was done the drive in the LEFT bay is Volume 1 and the drive in the RIGHT bay is Volume 2. Everything I had read beforehand led me to believe the drive volume assignments should be the opposite.

Sorry to hear this. I did exactly the same thing today, and the bloody thing wiped the drive with data.
Luckily I had a backup on another USB drive and currently it's restoring at approx 40GB per hour. This bug is inexcusable!

jesbo wrote:

No its borderline criminal; at minimum hugely negligent.  Since this device is tarketed at SOHO users, I expect many unsuspecting people are going to have heart failure when they add their second disk and all their valuable family photos and other files simply disappear from the first disk in the process.  Particularly when the add-disk dialogs say that existing data will not be lost.

Given that the disks we put in these units are Sooo large and cheap, my guess is that few people with large amounts of data on the DNS also have that data backed up elsewhere.  The reality (right or wrong) is it's simply too inconvenient and time consuming for most people to back it up regularly.

I can't agree more, and in fact that's exactly what happened to me: 7 years worth of personal photos and documents gone. And yes it's a bit unwieldy amount of data, requiring quite a few DVD's and constantly increasing.  I figured that replacing the drive once a year or 18 months would help me prevent failures in general, since I didn't think of running RAID 1 either (however in this case that probably wouldn't help anyway). I totally think it is borderline criminal as well--making me rather vindictive against d-link, wondering if there isn't anything we can do to get back at them-- and "heart failure" isn't far from what happened.

It just ruined my day, and the days following that.. I'm still trying to see if I can recover the information with some tools friend gave me, but so far it's been a mess. I am still keeping my fingers crossed, as what's been lost was priceless.

jesbo wrote:

I've been in the IT business too long... so I know that you don't do anything in the area of data/disk reconfiguration on ANY system without first having a full backup - no matter how inconvenient it may be to do it.

lesson learned, the hard way.

any tips on data recovery for ext2 drives will be appreciated.

Last edited by ciac (2009-04-12 21:37:46)

eh.. i tried to scan the drive for days using R-Studio, but for some reason it has no luck recovering any of the files in my DNS-323 storage era. It actually managed to find files from long long time ago, but no real signs of any of those most recently erased files.

does anyone know if an ext2 format from DNS-323 is beyond recovery? does anyone have any experience with recovering files from this error (since my experience is obviously not unique, except that I have no backups.. -_-")? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks so much.

sake wrote:

I also encounter this stupid bug, and loss bulk of my company crucial data.
R-Studio can get back some of them in my case, but not all.

I cannot sleep for few days.  Absolutely feel like being in a friend funeral.

Shame on the DNS-323 team.

We have to move on, anyway.

i did a "scan" which took a long time, but I don't get what's going on afterwards. in all the "recognized" sections, it just called out a bunch of weird files that's apparently irrelevant. All that "work" had my hopes high too. What did you do to recover the files? I can't believe they are just all gone like that...

I typed "ext2 data recovery" into google.   
There do appear to be some options.   Can anyone recommend one for our friends who experienced this problem?

ciac wrote:

I completely agree that D-Link should be held responsible for this. After all, this is the US market with exalted consumer rights (or at least I hope), and they should know what they are getting into when they entered this lucrative premiere market. If they aren't up to snuff, then they need to bleed for it. It's only fair to the other companies who toiled to meet the expected standards.

Well, you can read all about the D-Link USA warranty here: http://support.dlink.com/products/warra … classb.pdf  (pretty wimpy, eh?)
But, I'm fairly sure, the primary legal excuse clause drafted by any data storage vendor's legal team is: "The Company is not responsible for your data."

Good luck.

Last edited by mig (2009-04-21 00:22:20)