Update: After about 16hrs into this triage… And im no where near getting my data back to a sharing state.
16hrs of my time wasted fixing WDs bug. (so far)
I used the above mentioned paragon driver software to “look” at all the drives. Ill be upfront and say I know little to none agout Linux EXT4 partitioning except for what I am being forced to learn on the fly. (As eluded to earlier I have pulled all of these drives into a windows machine dock with the EX4 reading driver because the EX4 sees all of them as a new drive with no volumes)
Each of 4 drives has 3 partitions on it with the largest partition I am assuming is the data because thats where I found some. I have not looked at what the other 2 partitions are for. They are pretty small in comparison to all drives capacity.
3 of the 4 drives have data in the “data” partition. (Still dont know if its viable yet) (and it is still not accessable in the EX4.) The one drive that doesnt have any data has all the partitions but no “volume meter”. ie specs show 3xxx gb, but doensnt have the “fill bar” below it in windows, and when I click on reads, it needs to be formatted.
Coincidentily the drive that has no data was drive 1 / Volume 1. So it looks like Drive 1 “lost” its volume & partition information, but why would that corrupt all the others? To sgallant04 comments about little room in JBOD, I agree, but again, why across all 4 drives? Loosing 1 drive for a standard drive failue is the risk I am willing to accept for running JBOD, but again, not across all 4! They should not be joined / spanned for any reason which is why im running it that way. My data is not totally critical to loose warranting any type of such redundancy nor expense. (but then again looking at my financial analysis below, it may pay for itself…) Again my point and question to WD is why all drives, and how much it costs comsumers to troubleshoot thier product faults.
I am currently running diags on drive 1. > Keep you posted with results. (and so far the drive is passing diags.)
Paragon has another software I am debating purchasing because it support EXT4 and to look at drive 1 in more detail:
Hard Disk Manager 14 Suite
I have NO idea if this is any good, or ad/spyware… (glad sgallant04 has left a positive note, thanks.) (any others?)
FINANCIAL IMPACT ANALYSIS of owning this WD EX4: (and this is just for this issue, not the previous5 I have had)
16hrs (so far) @ $60hr (average computer tech repair rate) = $960
An additional 4TB “temp/swap” drive to swap data = $150
Another estimated 130 hrs to copy data @ 30MBs = say at $30per hr = $3900
Probably pickup this Paragon Hard Disk Manager 14 Suite @ $49.95 (supports EXT4)
GRAND TOTAL (so far) > $5059.95… (and climbing) THANKS WD for such a wonderful product!