[Hampshire] One for the Bit Twiddlers out there

I hve been given a small NAS device as payment for 'fixing' a problem on
a Mandriva System where I wouldn't mount an NTFS volume properly.
The NAS device uses ext2 for its filesystem and is very underpowered.
Before I can blat the 120Gb disk, I need to try to get some files off it
and give them back to the original owner.
The problem lies that his backup software hiccupped and there are two
directories with the same name of the root of the disk.
So obviously, normal utilities will barf at this situation.

Is there anyway I can somehow rename one of the directories using means
other than filenames. Back when I was using OSF/1 & Tru64, I had a
utility that would to that very thing. I got it from the team that were
developing the Logical volume Manager software.This name mangled all the
directory names in any given directory so that they were totally unique.
At that time, there some bugs in the LVM software so that using this
little app gave us a work around until a proper fix was available (circa
1994)

Stephen D