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I have a bunch of old SATA hard drives which I am gathering data from using a standard SATA USB Enclosure. Everything works well except with two drives (500GB each) that I took out from my NAS (D-Link DNS 323) enclosure. When these drives are hooked up, they show under Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management. In case it helps, the drives were configured as JBOD rather than RAID.

However there is no drive letter assigned and all context menu options are greyed out except for Convert to Dynamic Disk and Delete Volume. Conversion to dynamic fails with the following message: "The operation is not supported by the object".

The computer used is running Windows 7 64 bit and detects other SATA drives fine using the same USB enclosure.

How can I gain access to the contents of these drives?

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CORRECTION: I cannot be sure if the NAS configuration was JBOD rather than RAID. I set it up myself years ago but cannot remember and the NAS device itself is out of commission.

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  • right click in the small square area to the left in the lower pane, is "import foreign drive" available?
    – Moab
    Commented Oct 23, 2012 at 21:28
  • @Moab: Not sure which area you are referring to.
    – Raheel Khan
    Commented Oct 24, 2012 at 8:25
  • Small square to the left of your red circle where it says Disk2
    – Moab
    Commented Oct 24, 2012 at 15:01
  • @Moab: Ah I see. The context menu you see overlapping that square is actually by right-clicking it. And it does not have the option you asked about. Please see my comments against Matt's answer below, which explain what I think is going on.
    – Raheel Khan
    Commented Oct 24, 2012 at 19:55

1 Answer 1

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My bet is the disks were setup as RAID or some other physical disk spanning arrangement and Windows CompMgmt just doesn't recognize the partition type.

If the contents are important I think you have to do some sleuthing to determine the partition type, and from that determine options for mounting and recovery. A bootable linux cd/usb could be very helpful for this. I've used SysRescueCd to good effect, there are other choices too.

If the contents don't matter so much, just delete the volumes and create new ones.

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  • Thanks. That appears to be the case as I found here. Am trying Ext2IFS now.
    – Raheel Khan
    Commented Oct 23, 2012 at 8:13
  • The NAS device runs Linux, which is why I can see the drive but Windows cannot access it. Apparently, Ext2IFS does not work with Windows 7 so I will try to boot up with a Ubuntu CD to see if I can access it.
    – Raheel Khan
    Commented Oct 24, 2012 at 8:28

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