My ReadyNAS Ultra 2 has died and now shows both hard drives as dead. It still boots up but but intermittently shows 1 hard drive working so I'm sure that it is a hardware issue and not that both working drives died at the same time. I have RAID setup and need to recover my data. Can I just transfer the drives to a new ReadyNAS or will they need to be reformatted? Will these drives only work in a ReadyNAS device or would a different NAS platform support them without reformatting?
They would need to be in a pro or ultra to be immediately readable. It is also possible to mount the volume in an x86 linux system, though I don't know the command sequence to do so.
Have you tested the drives with vendor tools in a PC?
I have tried to run the disk through my Mac disc utility but it says : This disk doesn’t contain an EFI system partition. If you want to start up your computer with this disk or include it in a RAID set, back up your data and partition this disk.
If you are sure that the box is dead and not the drives then you can put them in another 4.x based system. The system uses MD RAID / LVM and EXT4 so mounting directly on a PC or Mac is not possible outside of a linux environment. Is it still under warranty?
Do you have a spare drive lying around? I would take a spare drive and see if you can factory reset your system with a different drive. This will confirm if it is indeed the box.
Be very careful however, as it will wipe whatever is on that spare drive
You need to follow the factory reset steps explicitly in this situation. Holding in the reset button during boot should take you to the boot menu, from there you can select factory reset.
It could be way better to ask a specialist to recover your data although the service is expensive I got my data recovered for less than $300 by www.295datarecovery.com
The alternative is to plug the drive into a PC and unformat it. You do that by right clicking on computer, and selecting manage. Scroll down to the hard drive, right-click on the volume[s] and choose delete.
Two disks means raid1 (both disks have a complete copy of the data). I suggested this to someone once before and it worked: http://www.ufsexplorer.com/rdr_ext23.php. You just use it with one disk. Runs on windows though.
