Router crashed now I need to get the files from the drive that was inside it.

[Meso]

My router with my cloud drive crashed and died. Now I can't access the files on the hard drive. I put the drive into a HD holder. My PC sees it but only when I look in the computer manager. Only options I have is to delete and I don't want to do that😑  The drive and its contents are fine I just can't get it to read due to the file system it's on.

[DaveLembke]

Boot your computer up with a Linux distro like ubunto or mint and see if you can see the files then. Lots of NAS and other network attached storage devices use a Linux based file system. Windows wont see it. You can burn a DVD for the installation disc for the latest distro. Boot the system off of that DVD and instead of installing Linux, just use the live linux environment that it provides. It should show you all drives connected mounted to the system including the drive that your trying to get data from. If you see the data then. Then you will want to insert a USB thumb drive that is equal to or greater than in size to the data to be copied off the drive that is formatted FAT32 or NTFS. And copy the data from the cloud drive to the USB Thumb drive. When copy is complete. shutdown computer. Remove the DVD. Boot the computer normal and your USB stick has all your data in either FAT32 or NTFS file system which Windows can read.

I had a Buffalo NAS that died and this is the method I used to get the data off of it, and migrate the data back to the land of Windows.

The worst thing anyone could do is when windows detects the drive is format or create a new partition. If you accidentally did this then your issue has gotten far worse.

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

I would try the recovery software , reclaim me from here http://www.reclaime.com/

That will recover data from from most drive formats it is free to try but you will need to buy a copy to recover your files.

[DaveLembke]

Thanks for sharing that Lisa. I was only aware of GetDataBack which only supports FAT32 and NTFS. Like reclaim you also need to spend the money to get the data off the drive is you use the software. Havent tested out reclaim yet, but assuming they will give you a teaser in the trial of it to show you we found your data with actual files you can pinpoint as being your files, but no ability to copy them to a safe location until you buy and register. 

[camerongray]

Or rather than paying for something there's TestDisk for recovering partition tables http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk and PhotoRec for recovering files http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec.  They are free, open source, cross platform and work extremely well whenever I've needed them.  All you don't get is a pretty graphical interface although the text interface is certainly useable.