Mounting Synology drives on Linux

I took the disks from the Synology box and plugged them into a host with simple Linux distrib (in my case, Ubuntu, but that shouldn’t matter).

Just type:

    mount /dev/vg1000/lv /mnt

That’s it. You have the file system from your Synology box on your Linux machine. It may come handy in case your box crashed and you are waiting for a new one. In the meantime, you have access to your data.

In case you want to reuse the disks and dispose of them (WARNING: the following will destroy your data on those disks), here is how to do it.

    vgremove vg1000

Now check the md volumes that are available and that you didn’t create yourself (just use ls /dev/md12*). Then stop those volumes (replace md12? with the volumes you want to stop if you have additional ones on your system that you obviously don’t want to stop – they won’t stop if they are mounted anyway):

    mdadm -S /dev/md12?

Empty the beginning of the related disks, for each disk replace the … by your disk letter:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd… bs=1M count=1024

And now you can play around with partitioning etc without being bothered again by vg1000 or mdadm.