Unable to login to NAS or even access my drives

I do recommend testing the drives before you go farther. You can connect them to a windows PC (sata or with a usb adapter/dock) and test them with vendor tools (Seatools for Seagate, Lifeguard for Western Digital).

Power down the NAS before you remove the disks, and label them by slot so you return them to the original slot later.

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kmoolla wrote:

I have done nothing as of yet, but would an OS reinstall format the drives?

Thats what im worried of.

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 An OS reinstall will not format the drives.  The OS is partially reinstalled from the flash memory image.  The admin password is reset back to password, the network configuration is reset to the default (DHCP, MTU=1500, etc), and volume quota is disabled.  No other settings should be changed, and data should not be lost.

Of course, there is always some risk that something will go wrong.  I'm not sure it will help in this case, as we don't really know what is wrong.  But it might, and is reasonably safe.

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kmoolla wrote:

Say I do steps 1 and 2, do the update but dont put my old drives back, can I still my data off and copy it to the new drive via directly plugging it into windows/Linux via a SATA cable ?

Not sure what plugging the new drive into a linux system accomplishes, since you can't get the data off unless you can mount the old drives.

But if you can plug the old drives into a linux system that has mdadm and btrfs installed, you could try to mount the RAID array, and copy off the data you need.  

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kmoolla wrote:

I rather hash out the hypotheticals , before going ahead

Always a good idea.

One additional option is to use Netgear Paid Support (my.netgear.com).  You'd boot up the NAS into tech support mode, and that would allow them to access the NAS remotely.