How to read NAS drive in Windows

Often users are faced a situation when a NAS device stops providing access to the data stored on the NAS disks. It could happen due to a physical damage of the NAS device or due to a logical failure. There may be a lot of reasons, but the user's only desire is to get the data safe and sound.

If you just remove the disks from your NAS device and connect them to a PC either via USB or SATA ports on the motherboard, nothing happens. More than that, you won't even see your drives in Windows Explorer (in My computer). You can see the NAS disks in Disk Management (press WinKey + R on the keyboard, type diskmgmt.msc and then press Enter), but you still won't be able to access the data. It happens because NASes use several foreign to Windows technologies – Linux software RAID to combine disks into a single storage and Linux filesystem to store data on the RAID. That's why Windows doesn't provide access to the data stored on the NAS disks.

In order to read disks from the NAS device in Windows it's not enough to connect them to the PC. To get access to the NAS data, you need to use a NAS recovery software like ReclaiMe File Recovery which is capable of reading NAS metadata, recreating a NAS volume and extracting the files and folders stored on the NAS device.

How to recover data from a NAS drive using ReclaiMe

  1. Connect all the NAS disks to a PC running Windows. It's advisable to connect the disks directly to the motherboard using SATA cables. But if the motherboard lacks free SATA ports, you can use USB-to-SATA connections.
  2. Download, install and run ReclaiMe File Recovery.
  3. In the list of available devices, select the NAS volume and start scanning. Usually NAS volumes are listed under the Linux md-raid volumes or Linux LVM sections.
    4. Read NAS disks in Windows
  4. Use the Preview capability to check the quality of the recovery. If your images, videos, pdf files are displayed well, then all other files will open correctly after saving.
  5. Buy an Ultimate license key and copy the recovered data. Be aware you need to prepare an additional storage device (a drive or several drives) to save the recovered data to.

If the NAS volume is not listed or the recovered files are not displayed correctly in the Preview window, the array configuration is probably destroyed. In this case, you need first to recover the RAID array configuration using our ReclaiMe Free RAID recovery software. You can download the software and find out more information about RAID recovery on the www.freeraidrecovery.com

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