I haven’t been able to do it.

The short version is, I had a good conversation with Thaura (aka Qwen) and it said the NAS uses a proprietary format, and requires software installed to use it.

https://thaura.ai/?share=2aa94050-af42-4a00-95cc-8b4776ef65c4

Why? Because it doesn’t have a file system. The CS101 presents the disk as a block device over ethernet. So it must get formatted by client software that runs on Windows.

I did some xxd dumps to peek at different parts of the disk, and it was zeroes, excepting several bytes here and there that are probably a proprietary format used by the NAS.

➜  testdisk-7.2 sudo xxd  -l 20512 /dev/sdc | less 
➜  testdisk-7.2 sudo xxd  -o 1000000 -l 20512 /dev/sdc | less
➜  testdisk-7.2 sudo xxd  -o 100000000 -l 20512 /dev/sdc | less
➜  testdisk-7.2 sudo xxd  -o 50000000 -l 20512 /dev/sdc | less
➜  testdisk-7.2 sudo xxd  -o 20000000 -l 20512 /dev/sdc | less
➜  testdisk-7.2 sudo xxd  -o 80000000 -l 20512 /dev/sdc | less
➜  testdisk-7.2 sudo xxd  -o 200000000 -l 20512 /dev/sdc | less
➜  testdisk-7.2 sudo xxd  -o 100000000 -l 20512 /dev/sdc | less

I’m running PhotoRec file recovery software on it, but don’t have much hope of recovering anything.

Update: Recovered!

So, photorec found a bunch of text files, but they were byte swapped. So I fixed a few with:

dd conv=swab if=filename of=newfilname

That worked – and the files were HTML. It’s probably a copy or cache of a website.

Photorec also found a few large files. One was a “.diskimage” and the other two were “.ab”. I was unable to mount any of them as a formatted disk with a file system. So I byteswapped them, and tried again, and failed again.

So I went back into photorec and scanned each of the large files. The .diskimage file yielded 230MB+ of MMP3 and JPG files!

The others didn’t, or they yielded diskimage and ab files (maybe the recovery tool byteswaps internally).