I have one of the first Mediasmart servers and it has been running for years. I have replaced the drives a couple of times. Recently my systems drive started going bad, so I bought a new drive and put in in and loaded the disk and thought that I would just load the software to the systems drive and it would then boot up and all my shared files would be still there. Unfortunately, all the shared files are gone and it did a complete system wipe. I have years of photo's on those drives and unfortunately my last backup was a couple of years ago. I still have the system drive and I can look at it and I see the directory and all the files on it, but when I try to open them, I can't open them up. Any help on how to recover the files from this drive so I can copy them by on to my server?

I actually found a second "Shares" folder in a DE folder and all the files are good. So problem avoided.

Oh great! You didn't do a factory reset.
I have not had good luck with recoveries so am not surprised, but many people do have good luck, it just takes time to rebuild.
I do non-pooled backups and if I have problems, I do a factory reset and copy back.

Glad to hear you didn't lose any data. It makes ya pucker, I know, been their when I tried to do a in-place upgrade to 3.0 on my first ex-470 that went south.
Thank god you can always pull the drives and attach them to another pc via a usb to sata dock or open one up and plug it in.

As you found, you have to un-hide the folders.
Good Luck

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