If you are unable to access the data stored on your DNS due to a catastrophic hardware or software failure and exhausted all conventional options, a number of DNS owners (DNS-320, DNS-321, DNS-323, DNS-325, DNS-343) reported varying levels of success recovering their data using the following third party applications: Ext2IFS, R-Studio, and NAS Data Recovery.
Since the DNS series formats hard drives using the Linux filesystem, DNS-formatted drives are not directly readable by Windows PCs without the support of a third party application.
These applications require physically installing the DNS hard drives in a Windows PC and will enable direct access to DNS data via Windows. Based on DNS user experience reported in this forum, Ext2IFS works with Standard Volumes, RAID 0, and RAID 1, while R-Studio seems to work well with managing more complex disk configurations, such as JBOD and RAID 5. NAS Data Recovery works with RAID 5 arrays. Ext2IFS is free of charge, while R-Studio and NAS Data Recovery are available for purchase.
Software links:
Disclaimer: The applications described in this post are
not sanctioned by D-Link for data recovery. All reports describing the success of these software products for recovering DNS data are solely the result of end-user experience and observation. As such, DNS owners who choose to use these products for data recovery do so at their own risk.