NASLite Network Attached Storage

It appears that last night I managed to power down my NasLite box without shuting it down first (havn't yet managed to find it a home where it can run all the time). I brought up telnet to shut her down, but I guess I must not have answered "y" to the are you sure page or something.

Anyway, when I fired her back up today she can't mount disk-1. I tried using Fdisk to re-write the partition table, no effect, so I googled a bit and found R-Linux. Plugged the offending drive into my main WinXP box and R-Linux found the filesystem and all my precious files safe and well.

I tried a windows driver which allows access to ext2 partitions from WinXP, and that mounts the drive perfectly.

I have now just about finished recovering my files to another disk, but for future reference is there a way to revive a Naslite partition in this state without re-formating?

Also can I expect something like this to happen every time the Naslite box goes down without a proper shutdown? or have I just been unlucky this time?

Boot your Naslite box as normal and then sit and wait, Naslite runs a drive check that can take a fair while, I have a 400Gb and a 300GB drive in mine and it takes nearly an hour to run the diagnostic, Naslite will then repair any damage to the file system and remount the drives. You haven't damaged anything, and don't re format the drives, the problem is the screen doesn't actually tell you whats happening and it does look like its crashed. It hasn't so switch it on and then go back to it after an hour and your should be ok

Thanks for your reply Wilbur,

when I booted the machine up she took something like 20 minutes to start up with a lot of HDD access going on the whole time, when I finally got the 3 beeps which usually signify "ok I'm started and ready to rock and roll now" it couldn't see Disk-1, and the about page from the telnet console said that disks -2 and -3 were mounted properly but -1 was "unsuccessful" and in red.

Is this what you would expect? does the disgnostic continue after the machine finishes fireing up?

oh I forgot to mention, the drive in question is a 120GB Maxtor, the other two drives in the system are an 80GB Seagate and a 40GB Quantum Fireball (remember those?!)

I have to say mongoose that I would have expected drive 1 to be online and mounted succesfully after the file checker if you have access to the data on the drive via your windows pc then I think your quite right to back it up, I'd be thinking of changing the drive if I was you, not got much experience with maxtor drives, I tend to use seagate. Don't know if it'll give you any more info on the state of the drive but have you got SMART available and if so is it enabled?
If the filechecker has done it's job and still not mounted the drive I think you must have been very unlucky and the power off has killed the drive. My Nasbox has been powering off regularly over christmas because of a new consumer unit that seems to want to trip every time a bulb blows or sometimes when the garage light is turned off!!!!, I put a UPS on it but I must have had about 10 improper power offs, NASbox just gets switched back on and does it's check, I do have a niggling "how much damage have I done to the drives" thought in my mind but I never actually powered off whilst accessing the drives so the data seems ok.
I hope your system is ok maybe give it another reboot and see if it remounts, I'm not sure but can't you force a filecheck through option 4 of the menu? stand to be corrected on that one. Best of luck I'm sure if theres a way round it the other guys on the forum will be on to help eden and sanmaster you reading this

The drive is only a week old, I generally use Seagate myself but I bought this one from a local hardware store and all they had in was Maxtor so I bought one.

As I said before I have managed to copy the files off using my windows PC, which has had no problems reading the drive except for one spurious directory in amongst my MP3's which couldn't be accessed. Still nothing seems to be missing so all seems well.

I have re-formatted the drive with the C option which didn't turn up anything bad so I think she is ok. I'm just finishing putting my files back onto the drive now. Annoying that this happened so quickly after install, I hadn't had time to copy everything vital across to my nice, reliable Seagate 80G drive yet. Still, seems to be no harm done and I shall be more careful with my shutdowns in future, think maybe a UPS is in my future!