This topic has been marked solved and closed to new posts due to inactivity. We hope you'll join the conversation by posting to an open topic or starting a new one.
format hard drive no longer used in readynas raid 1
Hello everyone - I did some digging around and couldn't find anything specific on this.
I have a ReadyNas 102 on RAID 1 with 2 x 2TB. I originally had 2 x 1TB on RAID 1. I'm looking to repurpose the 1TB hard drives and wanted to format them.
(Who knew you couldn't connect them to your windows laptop to format? not this guy)
Wondering how I might go about formatting them. Do I remove one of the 2TB hard drives, insert one of the 1TB hard drives and use the web interface to format it? Is there a better or easier way?
I'm concerned that if I swap a 2TB with a 1TB then the NAS is just going to try to start mirroring to sync everything on RAID 1.
I used an external sata connector to connect the 1TB hard drive to my laptop and in Disk Management, its not initialized. When I try to initialize it, I get an error that states: data error cyclic redundancy check.
Which means something has failed - likely either drive has failed or the USB SATA adapter. Though also check that the cabling is secure (both data and power).
You might try testing the drive with vendor tools (Seatools for Seagate, Dashboard for Western Digital).
FWIW, I suggest zeroing the drive before resale instead of reformatting. Seatools has an test that will do that (though it might not be enabled with non-Seagate drives). There are other free tools that do this as well, including the AOMEI partition manager.
I read that I'd need mdadm and btrfs to get the drive to be able to be read in windows.
You are confusing reading the files on the drive with formating. Windows doesn't recognize the file system, so it won't mount it. But it's still just a SATA drive, so you can initialize, format, etc.
Re: format hard drive no longer used in readynas raid 1
I used an external sata connector to connect the 1TB hard drive to my laptop and in Disk Management, its not initialized. When I try to initialize it, I get an error that states: data error cyclic redundancy check. I read that I'd need mdadm and btrfs to get the drive to be able to be read in windows.
I used an external sata connector to connect the 1TB hard drive to my laptop and in Disk Management, its not initialized. When I try to initialize it, I get an error that states: data error cyclic redundancy check.
Which means something has failed - likely either drive has failed or the USB SATA adapter. Though also check that the cabling is secure (both data and power).
You might try testing the drive with vendor tools (Seatools for Seagate, Dashboard for Western Digital).
FWIW, I suggest zeroing the drive before resale instead of reformatting. Seatools has an test that will do that (though it might not be enabled with non-Seagate drives). There are other free tools that do this as well, including the AOMEI partition manager.
I read that I'd need mdadm and btrfs to get the drive to be able to be read in windows.
You are confusing reading the files on the drive with formating. Windows doesn't recognize the file system, so it won't mount it. But it's still just a SATA drive, so you can initialize, format, etc.
You have to do more than format. You need to delete the partitions, re-partition, and then format.
Yes. I was assuming @zekzek had deleted the partitions from Windows Disk Manager (because he said the CRC error happened when he tried to initialize the disk).
Re: format hard drive no longer used in readynas raid 1
I think the drive has failed. You were right that its just a sata drive that windows should recognize just fine. I had another identical 1TB hard drive that I plugged into the same sata cable and this 2nd drive fired up just fine and I'm currently formatting it.
I suspect that the first sata cable I used might have corrupted my original 1TB drive 😞
