readynas 516 decided it doesnt exist after adding 2 new WD Red 10tb drives

OK, This is going to be a long one, as I did plenty of things wrong in retrospect, and now I dont want to make any more mistakes going forward in case I can fix this.  I will state up front, my main goal is to get the Data off the NAS.  I do have an older backup, but it got full, so it is not complete, and I would like to make a complete backup.  This means that any advice that starts with "format the NAS and start over" will not be helpful.  I may end up there, but lets hope not.

I am an intermediate basic user.  I have had 6 readynas over the years starting back from when this was Infrant.  I know my stuff, but I am not a deeply knowledgable user.  I predominantyly use my nas for storage, backups and Plex and apple music serving.

starting onfiguration

RN 516 x 6 3TB WD Red

all drives working flawlessly for over 2 years now.  Nas has been flawless, though a bit slower now that the snapshots and data were approaching the max storage for the device.

Here are the steps I undertook in the order that I took them.  These steps led me here to this forum, so that cant be good right? All of this happened yesterday.

1.Purchased 2 WD Red 10TB drives

2. Turned on more complete logs for tracking login attempts (not sure why I did this.  I just discovered that it was disabled, and I deciuded it woudl be nice to know who was logging/attempting to log in).  To be fair, I am a basic user, so I may be calling this the wrong thing.  I include this here for two reasons a)  It was a change from the normal operation and b) I am having login issues now.

2b. Updated to the newest firmware  (this is my running guess for waht the problem is based on some other posts I have seen about login issues with this version)  I currently cant check the version number exactly, but i ThInk it is 6.1.0 as it is later than the most recent hotfixes(update as of yesterday).  I can't log in right now to check it (and the NAS is remote at the moment, so I cannot check the screen), as I am currently unable to login unless I reboot the nas, and then the login rights seem temporarty.  I have not changed any passwords anywhere.  Currently, when I log in, it keeps asking me to log in and wont take the admin password.  I eventually get shuttled to the recovery page and that doesn't work either.  I enter in the recovery info (correctly) and it spins for a while and then fails.  If I enter the wrong recovery info in, it instantly fails.  I have read that this can be fixed by a reinstall of the OS.  I didnt want to do that before I got some opinions here.  Note:  This password stuff occurrs AFTER my loss of shares (discussed soon).  I put it here, because it felt like it belonged here.

3.  Hot swapped a 10TB drave into slot #1

4. waited many hours for resynch

5.  Came home to find the resynch finished (solid blue light in Bay 1 and I also discovered a new red ligh on bay 3.  Looks like the third bay 3TB Red decided at exactly that moment to die.  I dont believe in cooincidences, but I thought, "hey, I have another 10TB replacement, I can just put that in now.  HOw convinient.  Seems I will be having a warrenty converstaion with WD over a 2 year old drive with a 5 year warrenty, but then again, I am not exactly sure that it is dead.  I just trusted the red light.

6.  webaccess of the nas told me that I was degraded and needed to fix the drive issue, and it listed bays 1,2,4,5,6 as working and bay 3 way grey.  This is whn I put the second 10TB into slot 3 (dont worry, I have both original drives and marked them for which bay they came from in the NAS.

7.  Resynch wait

8.  When finished, I reciece no error notices 9checked the logs) other than to say that there is a non-descript problem with the drives.  I am informed that there are no shares on my server, and would I like to create one?  Additionally, the overview screen shows all the drives as good and working when you mouse over them (and all the lights are blue on the system after a manual assessment of the NAS itself), but the overviw shows all six bays as Red, with green lights where the green lights would show trouble on the web interface.

I stopped here, as I am sure I couold reinstert the old drives and maybe get things working again, excet one MAY be dead now.  I didnt reinstall the OS again, just in case that would mess wtih my ability to recover data.  I rememebr that somewhere years ago I read that when you put larger drives in teh 516 you had to reformat it with the new bgger drives in to make it workand have the new big drives be recognized, but I can't imagine that is still the case now (maybe I am wrong). I know that I had 15TB of approximate space on my NAS before this started.  I had 7TB of data and 5TB of snapshots when I started the drive updates.  I dont know what that means for recovery, other than I have 12TB of space with both the 10 tb drives removed, which should mean that, even degraded from the X-Raid, it whould have enough space to not have lost files...maybe?

Ask questions in a slow manner and I will work hard to get you answers.  If you use less technical terms, or tell me where to look, I will do the legwork and put in the time.

Please help me ReadyNas community....you are my only hope (an infrant reference for those who get it)

Thanks in advavnce

PS I Ran out of servcice on this NAS in January, but I am willing to pay for support if I can't get help here.  I just thought I woudl try this first, since I rememebr back that this forum was every bit as good as any other support options back in the day