Hi there, I've been struggling with this problem for several weeks now and it's time for me to bite the bullet and get some help.

I've got a Western Digital My Book World Edition II (White Light) NAS server; it has 2x1Tb drives with volumes configured in Raid-1. It runs some distribution of Busybox I believe.

I was planning to upgrade this box to 2x3Tb drives, which I was successful at doing. Everything came unstuck when I put one of the 1Tb drives into my PC running Ubuntu and tried to access the data partition on the original drives.

It should be as simple as mounting the 4th partition, /dev/sda4 and accessing the data but unfortunately on both drives that volume has no filesystem information. I've tried all sorts of ways to try to recover the filesystem but either it is beyond me, or there is a proprietory Raid1 format that WD uses.
(Note that the boot volume and the swapdisk volumes can be assembled into Raid 1 arrays and accessed with no issues).


Long story short - when I put the original 1Tb drives (either both or just one) into the NAS, it no longer boots successfully.
The data partitions on the original drives are of unknown filesystem type and I have been unable to mount them.
The only success I've had is with a piece of recovery software called R-Studio which has found all of the files but there are no names, and no directory structure.

This success gives me hope that I may still be able to find a 'good' solution. I want to either: mount the data partition in Linux and recover the data; OR fix the Linux distribution so that the NAS server can boot up and then access the data.



I'd appreciate any tips, advice or expertise, and I'm more than willing at this stage to hire someone to sort this problem out safely without losing the data.