I have an older ReadyNAS (model ReadyNASRNDX4000). It's been working perfectly for years. Today we had a tree go down near the house, and it knocked out the power. Unfortunately, when the power came back on, my ReadyNAS did not. There is power in the chasis because lights are coming on, and the external backup disk fired up. However, none of the four drives are spinning up.
I was due for a new NAS, so I'm ordering one. My question is whether I can pull the drives out of my old NAS and install them in a new ReadyNAS RN31400? My concern is that I can't mount my USB backup disk to my PC or Mac. I'm almost positive I formatted that drive as FAT32, so I'm worried I may have lost all my data.
Re: Old ReadyNAS died - can I use disks in a new one
You could purchase the 314 and contact support for help on attempting to recover your data. There may be a charge for this and you would need somewhere to backup your data to e.g. another USB disk.
Are you sure you didn't format the USB disk with either the EXT3 or the EXT4 filesystem?
Re: Old ReadyNAS died - can I use disks in a new one
Given I can't connect my USB, I must have used EXT3 or EXT4.
Are you saying that I have to depend on my backup drive that I have no way to test without formatting the four drives I have? The other system is pretty much dead. Lights inside are on, but it will not startup.
Re: Old ReadyNAS died - can I use disks in a new one
Well one thing you could do is this.
1. Get a 314
2. Put a scratch disk (must not be from your array) in the 314
3. Update to the latest firmware
4. Verify update is successful
5. Connect the USB disk containing your backup. If it mounts fine then your backup should be O.K. hopefully.
6. If this has all the data you need you could make a second copy of it if you like e.g. to another USB disk
7. Safely unmount the USB disk and disconnect it
8. Power down
9. Remove the scratch disk
Then if you need to contact support about attempting to recover data from the NVX array you could. Otherwise you could proceed to do a factory default (wipes all data, settings, everything) with the disks in place and restore from backup.
OS6 can boot off the disks from an x86 OS4 system if you insert those and boot normally (be sure to update the firmware as suggested above first), but I'm not sure whether this works with arrays taken from Intel 32-bit systems such as the NVX. If this works the system would boot into OS4 so you could copy off your data.
