Moving an EDA500 Expansion Chassis to a New NAS

I'm not sure what the "export" function does, so I wasn't sure what would happen if you try to import a non-exported drive to another NAS.  Or, for that matter, back to the same NAS after doing a factory default with the EDA disconnected.

When you export and import, the permissions are changed, since the user and group UID/GID may not be the same on the new NAS.  But I don't know how the export is part of that process.  And the UUID of the original and receiving NAS are different, which could cause all kinds of issues.

While it's a bit different, I just ran an experiment, moving a non-exported secondary volume (but not in a separate chassis) from one NAS to another. This failed.  The volume was not accessable, being labeled an unused volume.

So, I went to SSH and tried to mount it, and it was not shown as an MDADM volume.  So, I did an mdadm  --assemble  --scan, which created three new md_ devices, one from the OS volume partitions (partition 1) of the added drives, one from the swap volume partitions (partition 2, which the EDA500 should have as free space), and the one I was looking for from the data volume partitions (partition 3).  cat /proc/mdstat let me know that the one I was looking for, consisting of the third partition of the drives, was md126, so I did a mount  /dev/md126  /mnt to mount it to the /mnt directory that's present for just such recovery and investigative occasions.  That made the contents of the volume accessible from SSH, but nothing I tried could make the GUI identify the volume and make it accessible or make the NAS automatically re-assemble the volume on a re-boot.  So, this can serve as a way of recovering data from an "orphaned" volume via SSH (copying to another volume, USB device, or even mounted external device), but not to move a volume from one NAS to another.  It could get messier if the data volume consisted of more than one RAID layer.

Will an EDA500 volume behave the same, since it's in a separate chassis?  I don't know.  If you have a backup, I'd say just try it and reformat and recover from backup if it doesn't.  If you don't, and none of the Netgear folks chime in to say where I went wrong in my attempt, you're likely going to need paid Netgear support.

BTW, it appears nothng bad happened to the moved volume itself.  All went fine when I moved it back to the original NAS.  But if I had no backup, I don't think I'd trust that to always be the case and try any of this to see if the EDA volume behaved any differently.

Note, too, that I have previously created a volume "behind the scenes" with SSH and the GUI does recognize it once mounted, and does so permanently with an entry to etc/fstab.  So, there is definately something different in the movement vs. creation of a volume.  I suspect a lot of this has to do with the UUID of the moved volume not matching the one on the receiving NAS, which would not be the case on a created volume.  The UUID would also be different when re-connecting to a NAS that had been factory defaulted, so I expect there would be similar issues trying that.

How the "export" function  sets things up so it's not an issue, I have no idea.  So, I don't know if you can do that manually on another NAS or not.