Drive failure and replacement - my story

Hi,

I had 2 drives set up in JBOD mode in my EX2. One of 500GB and the other 2TB.
The 2TB drive failed after about 4 years and I went about replacing it.
I plugged in a new drive and got a solid red light for it… but it was showing good in the disk status.
I mailed WD support and received a pretty useless reply several days later.
I figured that I might have to set up the RAID mode but I was worried (maybe for good reason and maybe not) that it will erase the data in the good drive which has 400 GB worth of personal photos, video clips and such. So I spent 24hrs backing it all up (partially manually after the built in USB backup seemed to stop halfway through).
Then I took out the good HD and put in the new one and set up the JBOD. Lo and behold - it worked. But, after adding in the old (500GB) HD - similar story. Good on the status page but not accessible.
Factory reset - no good.
Then I found an option to mount in the the volume encryption page and remembered that I had the old encryption key stored somewhere… That brought me another step forward and I now had 2 functional hard drives in my NAS. The only “minor” problem is that I could not see my data on the 500GB volume.
I then created a share with the same name as it had before and a few minutes later, to my relief it showed up with a usage of 418GB.
Hallelujah!
It’s a long story and I may have made some mistakes along the way but maybe it can be of use to someone. Also, maybe WD can put together an update and instructions to make this a little less painful than it was.

Ori

Thank you for sharing your experience. It may become helpful to other Users in need.