Raidar has constant blue light and cannot access setup

dbzisme wrote:
Yes I have definatly learn my lesson. I didn't know it could do that.

Well it shouldn't have, I think, but you do need to be careful. An up to date backup for important data on production machines is important.

dbzisme wrote:
I wonder how the hard drive can just burn out. Shall I buy a hard drive and start fresh?

Disks can and do fail at any time. That might be simplest.

I have never heard of wdidle3 sorry.

dbzisme wrote:
I have never heard of wdidle3 sorry.

I guess the main question really is if the disk is for certain dead. widdle3 is a bit of a distraction.

There are a couple of options:

(a) You can simply buy a new drive, and hope it works. The main question there is which drive. Sticking to the HCL is a bit annoying, since Netgear hasn't finished testing the WD20EFRX yet for the Duo - which is probably the best general NAS drive from WDC.

(b) If the drive is under warranty, you can exchange it for a refurbished drive. You do this here: http://support.wdc.com/warranty/index_end.asp?lang=en Note there is a link there which lets you check the warranty status. The risk here is that you haven't been able to run Lifeguard to test it. WD might return the drive and charge you for shipping. However, I think that is unlikely.

You can do both (a) and (b).

(c) Continue trying to test the drive. Since you have trashed your desktop once already attempting to do this, I am thinking that you should probably give up on running the diags. WDC and Seagate will accept RMAs from folks who can't run their diags.

thank you for the huge help StephenB and MGMT.

sorry for my little knowledge of all this, all I wanted was a NAS to store my downloaded movies which i can grab onto my popcorn hour media player.

i will go for the new harddrive as I needed one anyway as the backup harddrive. my question is

what if the same thing happens to the new harddrive which is obviously likely. do you think i can somehow get my files from the old harddrive and the PC
harddrive?

also is there a hard drive you can recommend which is 2TB

On the PC, it isn't clear to me that the PC hard drive is actually dead. It is possible that you broke something on the PC system board (for instance the SATA controller) and that the drive itself is still ok.

It seems much less likely that you can recover data from the NAS drive. There are some services out there that you could try, some don't charge you if they don't get the data back.

As far as avoiding the failure in the future, one thing is to install two drives in the Duo, which will mirror the two drives - maintaining your data if only one drive fails. A second thing is to do regular backups to another device (such as a USB drive).

You can also back up the PC to your NAS (though 2 TB can get used up pretty quickly, especially if you have a collection of HD movies).

dbzisme wrote:
also is there a hard drive you can recommend which is 2TB

Personally I would get the WD20EFRX. Though this idea is controversial, since that drive isn't on the hardware compatibility list. You won't get Netgear support if you go off the HCL (which is a big minus). But a lot of the drives on the Duo HCL are obsolete/hard to find. And then there's that "do I need to run widdle3" thing. (It would be a non-issue with the WD20EFRX).

Thanks again. I didn't even know there was a list of hard drives which net gear only support,

May I ask why I wouldn't need to run wdidle3 with the wd20efrx?.

I will buy 1 hard drive and make sure all is good. And if it is I will buy an additional hd.

Because unlike the WD Green drives the WD RED drives are designed for NAS use so WD has already made an appropriate WDIDLE3 setting on the WD RED.

I'm guessing you guys are in I.T ?

Really appreciate the help. I could ask you questions all day ha ha.

I will see how a new hd goes