I was hoping someone could shed some light on a little problem for me i have searched and cant find the answer but im sure its something simple.
I replaced the 2x 500gb drives in my readynas 2100 as on 98% full and was getting a data sector error off one of the drives, Its now running nice and smooth on 2x 2TB drives but i want to re-use the old drive or maybe drives, my problem is when plugging them into the pc it shows the drive straight in my computer but it shows 0mb for free or used space and shows no files on there along with the fact you cant format it, when i click format nothing happens.
How can i wipe these drives and reformat them so they can be used again?
I'm sure there are other ways of doing this, I am also interesed in hearing other methods of wiping hard drives after they have been installed in a raid configuration.
I use fdisk to erase the drive clean, then I install the drive into a pc with a spare sata cable and go into computer management settings>disk management>locate the drive on the list>format drive.
I used the above procedure twice yesterday, with no problems.
I believe FDISK (in DOS) technically only removes (writes over) the file allocation table and master boot record, so does not actually remove data. If you want to 'restore' a drive to its factory state, tools such as Seagate SeaTools and DiscWizard (for Seagate drives) and other manufacturer equivalents are needed to do a low-level format. There are some Linux desktops (live CDs) that can do the same thing. Also test the drive integrity. This is always a good idea because that will mark bad sectors, and presumably those are not something you want to start with when you are installing a 'used' drive in a RAID configuration.
