How to reformat hard drive to be used in EX2

I spoke too soon in another thread about having success.  One of my 4TB drive had been cloned to look like a 1TB drive since the EX2 was set to Raid-1.  I copied the data onto a second 4tb drive.  Now the first 4tb drive continues to fail being mounted into the second EX2 slot.

Can anyone provide me some insight on how to re-format these drives so that the EX2 will recognize it?  The format feature on the Dashboard, under SETTINGS/UTILITIES, is greyed out so I can’t click on it.  I get a VOLUME FAILURE CODE:4 message.  I’ve used QParted and thought I reformatted to QPT partition and EXT4 file format.  The allotted space shows 3.64TB.  Should I be formating this to NTFS, or something else?

Thanks again!

You don’t need to format the drive. You simply need to remove all partitions on the drive. And then place it in the EX2 which will take care of the formatting.

To remove partitions you can use one of several free tools - there are many out there but right now I can only think of parted_magic (I have used this but it isn’t free…costs $10 that then allows you to download an ISO image that you burn to a blank CD and then boot from the CD which will bring you into a linux system with GUI and you can use the partition editor GParted shown in the desktop screenshot as Partition Editor →   http://partedmagic.com/screenshots/ ) ).

Alternate free tools (haven’t used these but should work) are just the GParted tool itself (you need to download and burn the GParted live/boot cd iso and boot from that cd - http://gparted.org/ )) or the Paragon free version of Partition Manager ( http://www.paragon-software.com/home/pm-express/ ).

If this answers your question, please click the star to give me a kudo.

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Thanks again Cybernut1 for providing helpful information. 

Prior to seeing your response, I did have success in formating the drive.  Before, I would go into SETTINGS>UTILITIES.  The format drive option was greyed out.  I was reaching for any option and stumbled into the STORAGE tab where theres the option to change RAID MODE.  Once I clicked to activate JBOD, the EX2 started to format the drive.  Everything looks good so far as the EX2 now reports for 3.9TB available. 

So that I don’t speak too soon again, I’ll see how well it converts from JBOD to RAID-1.

Thanks again!