I just bought bigger hard drives, as I was running out of space with my DNS-320 network storage. Unfortunately, the DNS-320 does not support RAID scaling. So I needed to remove the old drives, set up a fresh new RAID array with the new drives, and manually copy the data over from the old drives to the new drives.
The zinger here is that the DNS-320 formats the hard drives in the Linux EXT3 format, which is not supported in Windows. I tried a bunch of different free Windows utilities to read the EXT3 partition, but none of them behaved well with my Windows 7 machine.
Enter the Hackintosh! A quick search let me to instructions to install MacFUSE and FUSE-Ext2, and after a very short time doing the installation, the EXT3 drive automatically mounted, and I had no problems reading from it!
Now it would have been nice to connect both the old and new EXT3 drives to the Hackintosh and copy from one directly to the other, but the drives automatically mounted with read-only access. That same page above outlined a fix to the auto-mount script, but after that, the drives wouldn’t mount at all. The main software page had instructions for manually mounting the drives with write access, but I’m still on the steep part of the learning curve for the Terminal commands.
So I ended up copying the old EXT3 drive to a FAT32 drive, which will then be copied to the new EXT3 drive. But this was still a good use for the Hackintosh, and it was definitely a time savings over trying to do this in Windows!
So your challenge is that you need to move the data on the hard drive to a new hard drive which means you effectively need the DNS320 to take the data off and put it back on. But of course, you can only use it for one purpose at a time. And you can’t hold the data in your hand in the mean time. So where does the data go?
My first thought is you just copy the data to your local computer using the same mechanism that you usually use to access data on the DNS320, then with the data safely stored elsewhere, you can then rebuild the DNS320 with new hardware and move the files back to it. But I’m guessing that wasn’t an option because you didn’t have the space anywhere else to hold the data temporarily? Therefore, you somehow want to copy the data from the old DNS320 drives to new DNS320 drives which requires you to have that data accessible outside of the DNS320 box?
Personally, I’d probably hook it up to one of my Linux computers (either OEL or Mythbuntu). But if one didn’t have any Linux in the house, then the Hacintosh is a good way to go. It is Unix based, of course, and MacFuse is a good product that I use too. But I probably would have put the new drives into the DNS320 and then only used the Hac to access the data from the old drives meaning all you would need is read access on EXT3. I especially like this approach because it means that the DNS320 can write the data to its own drives which somehow seems like a safer approach – you teach it your data and it stores it versus having a brain transplant. I know it should just be based on the filesystem type but I’ve seen different computers do wacky things with the same filesystem data. I’m sure it would take longer to do that way but an overnight job with your network going full speed wouldn’t be too bad. And you do have gigabit within the house, I assume, or at least be able to ensure gigabit between DNS320 and your Hac temporarily hosting the disembodied EXT3 drive?
Oh, and I forgot to mention, I’m not a big fan of going through a FAT32 drive for your transfer. Again I know it is just data but something about translating the data from the EXT3 storage to FAT32 and then back to EXT3 seems like too much monkeying around with data when all you really needed was to go from one EXT3 drive to another. That’s why I was thinking of the scenario in my previous comment – just forgot to give me reason why in that comment.
The thought of setting up the new hard drives in the DNS-320, reading the old EXT3 drive, and then writing directly to the DNS-320 came to mind briefly when I was still looking at getting Windows to read the old drive. But even though I have a gigabit network and the DNS-320 is gigabit compatible, in practice I only read/write at about USB speeds. So that let me down the path of putting them both in the Windows box and writing from one directly to the other. When I hit a dead end there, I tried doing the same on the Hac – though with both on USB, not directly connected to the SATA controller. But I wasn’t thinking that there’s no benefit to that, as I wouldn’t get the benefit of the faster speed of internal drives, duh! That’s what I get for doing this late at night.
Since it didn’t finish copying last night, I’m going to start over and follow your suggestion. It will take less time than the double copying approach I was using, and fewer opportunities for corrupting data too? I just have to figure out how to mount the drive inside the DNS-320 to the Hac, but that shouldn’t be too hard.
I agree, less opportunities for corrupting data. Should be minimal in the first place but why not make it even more minimal?
As for mounting, don’t sweat it. I’ve had a computer open with a hard drive hanging out on the chassis supported by some nonconductive no-skid stuff overnight during a similar operation and it was no big deal.
But here’s the rub: the DNS-320 doesn’t play too well with the Mac. I was able to get an NFS share to the DNS-320 working, but my Hac doesn’t have gigabit ethernet, so it is copying slow. Maybe using the Hac to copy the EXT3 to a FAT32 disk, then walking the FAT32 disk over to the PC to copy over to the DNS-320 will be quicker. We’ll see…
For anyone looking to get NFS running on the DNS-320, I found this link helpful:
http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=20999.0
Followed by another guide to get NFS volumes mounted in OSX, but I didn’t need to go this far:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/mac/mounting-nfs-volumes-in-os-x/430
I didn’t read past the fact that the DNS320 doesn’t play well with the Mac. In my opinion, time for a new NAS.
Ha! But I did get it to work, but not optimally.
Though you know, I had previously put in a rack mount in my PC which accepts bare hard drives. I have three new hard drives, two for the RAID array, and the third rotates with one of those two and lives off site at the cabin. So the old hard drive is back in the DNS-320, one of the new hard drives is in the PC rack mount, and now I am copying the data from the DNS-320 to the new hard drive in the rack mount. Then I can set up the new RAID array with the two remaining new hard drives and then copy to it from the third new hard drive in the PC rack mount. Duh again!