Help swapping "dead" drive? [Case #15693780]

BigBearf wrote:

@mjw3786 I have not read the entire thread but I have a RNPP and six WD20EADS drives. I recall updating firmware a while back and I had some problems. I had escalating LLCs and eventually ran the Dos utilities TLER ON & WDIDLE /D on the affected drive and it stopped the increasing LLCs. I then had a drive show up as "DEAD" and I do not remember exactly how this happened but to make a long story short here is the saga. I went to BB and got two new WD drives with the proper firmware revision and then shut down the RNPP and pulled the dead drive. As suggested by mdgm I ran the vendor tools and found no problems. Next I ran the DOS utilities listed above and just for kicks put it back in the RNPP and flipped the power toggle and watched as the unit resynced the "DEAD" disk thinking that it would not work. After resyncing the "DEAD" hard drive showed no SMART errors and has functioned without problems for over 10 months. I still have one of the new hard drives available just in case but why don't you try the DOS utilities. What do you have to lose? Please check my posts for the "how to" steps and post your results. Hope this helps. bigbearf

Please bear with me as I am not familiar with the DOS tools you mentioned. This post gives me hope though, so thank you for that! A quick google search shows that WD no longer makes the wdidle utility available to consumers. Where is a safe place to get these tools? I assume I would need to connect the drives to a pc directly to run the utility? Is there any issue with doing this that might damage the data on disk? One other question. Should I first try running the tools on my original "dead" disk before attempting to get the NAS to recognize the new disks? I feel like the original disk may not be bad, but I suppose running the vendor tools can tell me this, yes?

PapaBear, I had originally installed 4 of the WD20EADS-00W4B0 [2TB WD Green Caviar - 64MB Cache] - when the slot 3 drive showed dead, I tried hot removing and adding it back with no luck. I tried rebooting the NAS a couple of times but continued to get "XRAID engine failed to start" and "shares missing" to go along with 3 "healthy" drives and a 0MB/OMB free message as well. argh

I RMA'd the "dead" drive to WD and they sent out a WD20EARS-00MVWB0 as a replacement. It looks like a recertified "green" drive with a black label. I tried hot adding this with no difference in results. While I was waiting for the RMA disk to arrive, I also ordered a second "hot spare" so as not to make this waiting process an issue in the future. This drive came from newegg and is also a WD20EARS-00MVWB0, this one being new with the standard green label. All of these are 2TB, in case that wasn't clear.

The volume is inaccessible "The paths for the shares listed below could not be found. Typically, this occurs when the ReadyNAS is unable to access the data volume. media backup" and I also see this when entering frontview: "A SATA reset has been performed on one or more of your disks that may have affected the RAID parity integrity. It is recommended that you perform a RAID volume resync from the RAID Settings tab ( accessible in the Volumes page => Volume tab in FrontView ). The resync process will run in the background, and you can continue to use the ReadyNAS in the meantime."

Obviously the resync volume button is greyed out and will not allow a resync. I think I need to go to the DOS tools stage now?

Here is the data size info, I believe:

Ch 1 : WDC WD20EADS-00W4B0 [1862 GB] 0 MB free
Ch 2 : WDC WD20EADS-00W4B0 [1862 GB] 0 MB free
Ch 4 : WDC WD20EADS-00W4B0 [1862 GB] 1860 GB free

If you guys can point me in the direction of the tools I need to download, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to help me figure this out.