replacing failed hard drive

Also I logged into frontview and the status of drive 2 says dead.

Since it is a backup NAS, risk is low.
Was the disk brand new?
Did you format it before inserting?
Did you test the new drive using a PC and vendor tools?

Leaving the NAS on, remove the new drive from slot 2.
Wait to receive a message that the drive has been removed.
Reinsert the drive and wait for the NAS to indicate that it has seen the new drive.
If this doesn't work, reboot with the new drive in.

Thanks very much for your speedy reply. Everything is new. I didn't format the drive. Was I supposed to do that first? I just thought readynas would do that. I have an external drive enclosure that I can put the drive in. The external drive enclosure connects to the computer by USB, so if the drive needs to be formatted I could do it that way. Thanks!

No don't format the drive. The reason I asked is that some users insert formatted drives and this can sometimes lead to problems like yours.
Remove it, wait a while, hopefully you'll see a message about drive removal, then reinsert it.

Ok, thanks. I removed the drive, after several minutes frontview still says the drive is there but dead. So do you think I should make sure I have backups of everything on external drives, then shut down the readynas pro without the number 2 position filled, then turn it back on and see if the message changes? I assume if the message doesn't change or if it can't boot up then I would need to return the readynas pro for repair? Or maybe there's something else I should do first. Again, thanks for your speedy advice.

I thought you said this NAS was a backup of another NAS?
I think what you need to do is insert the new disk, if it's not recognised then reboot the NAS.

Hi. Yes it is a backup of another readynas. In most cases I actually have several backups of my files, however there are some files on the backup readynas that are only on the other readynas. For example I bought a lot of courses from greatcourses.com and I only have them on the first readynas with a backup on the second readynas, mainly because they take too much room on my computers...same thing with about 1 tb of music I bought and ripped from cds, but I recently made copies of my music onto external drives. I prefer to have more than one backup of my files at any one time, which is why I have started to make second backups on external drives but I just started doing that and haven't finished yet. However if the second readynas fails to boot up for some reason I think it's very unlikely that the other readynas will fail before I can move the rest of my files onto external drives, so I will insert the new disk, then if not recognized I will reboot the readynas. Thanks again for the help.

I don't think you'll be risking anything by reinserting the disk.

Ok I put the new disk in, nothing changed so I closed the frontview webpage and shut off the readynas, then turned the readynas back on. The led message on the front of the readynas still flashed "Vol C degraded" along with some other message about drive 2 indicating the drive was not working, which I think I've seen before but can't remember what it was right now...so it appeared to me that nothing had changed and so I opened up frontview and nothing changed there also, just showing me the drive was dead...except now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure there was no longer an X over the number 2 position on front of the readynas. Then a bit later I saw a different message on the front of the readynas, which was "vol c unprotected", which gave me some hope of something different happening, then a bit later I saw some resync message on the front of the readynas, and at this time the number 2 position is flashing with the message Resync C: 2.6%. So it appears to be working. Frontview still shows Disk 2 as dead with the temp at 0 C / 32 F, but at the bottom of the frontview "Health" page, instead of just having a solid amber light beside the word "Disk", the light is flashing from green to amber and also is flashing the same beside the word "Volume".

Now I guess I will put the defective drive in a USB external enclosure and run windows checkdisk on it. Perhaps there are just some defective clusters which can be fixed...if not then I will take the drive back to where I bought it and ask about the warranty. Also just now in frontview I clicked on "Logs" and I see a few good messages, "system is up", then "Data volume will be rebuilt with disk 2", then "RAID sync started on volume C. Thanks again for the speedy help!

You should use wd tools to test the disk and then have it replaced by wd. I think they have an online support facility.
The will want to know results of the short and long tests before they'll agree an rma.

http://support.wd.com/product/download. ... =3&lang=en