Moving an EDA500 Expansion Chasis to a New NAS

I just had this same problem.  My os corrupted when updating to 6.10.1 on my 312 and after an OS reinstall the readynas wouldn't read the raid 5 on my eda500.  

It's easy if you have a working readynas to select the eda500 and export the volume to be able to transfer the eda500 to a new readynas, but if your readynas kicked the bucket you seem like you are out of luck.  Any time the os is reinstalled or parent readynas is changed the eda500 info used to recognize the structure of the disks is lost.  

But all is not lost.  Here is how I reclaimed my -what I thought was lost- data.

You will need an external (or internal) drive that has a large enough capacity to hold all of the data from the eda500 (or multiple drives) formatted to a file system you use most often (Windows is NTFS).  These drives are for transferring back to the eda500 after the data is pulled off as you will have to destroy the drives in the readynas os to get them recognized again.

You need a pc that has enough sata ports to accomidate the drives from the eda500, plus (if you are using internal drives to copy to) the destination drives.  Not an issue with usb external drives, in fact this is the way I'd recommend as external drives are often less expensive.

You will have to use that pc to dual boot your preferred Linux distro (I used Ubuntu), and either have a working knowledge of linux or a really good Google-fu.

You need to install Linux to the pc, and then install mdadm.  Provided there is no damage to the drives and the RAID isn't broken, Ubuntu will immediately recognize your volume and allow you to copy data off of it to your external drives once mdadm is installed.

Once you have installed your linux distro...

Open terminal.  Type:  

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:eugenesan/ppa

Then:

sudo apt-get update

Finally:

sudo apt-get install mdadm -y

Once I did this the volume of my RAID 5 was immediately visible (mounted) and I have already started copying the data to my external drives (bought 1 8tb, and have several other sizes that I use a usb toaster with).

Hope this helps you and anyone else finding this through Google!  I wish there was a way to make the EDA500 plug and play with other readynas devices, as linux with mdadm makes it seem possible.

Aaron