I have a 2016 My Book Duo where the enclosure failed. While I was on the phone with WD Support, drive 2 failed! Configuration is RAID 1.
I bought a new My Book Duo of the same size. The enclosure looks different.
I’m trying to figure out the best course of action to preserve the data on the 1 working hard drive.
Can I configure the new hard drive as RAID 1, and then pop out the old drives and put them in the new enclosure, have the new enclosure detect the failed drive, put in a new drive (from the new My Book) and have it rebuild the drive? Or can I just put the old drives in the new enclosure and have it know that it’s RAID 1 configuration, detect the broken drive, replace it, and have the broken drive get rebuilt?
It’s obviously out of warranty from WD, and so Support won’t help me, even with answers on what I should do.
I’d rather avoid a data recovery service if possible, but would like more information on how to do this without screwing up the working drive.
Run the Duo in a degraded state with the single working drive. Copy the files to another working drive and keep that as a backup (a RAID is not a backup). Then restore the backup to your new Duo.
I don’t know whether it would be safe to do what you are proposing. I say this because I don’t know how your new Duo would treat the metadata from the old one. It would be disastrous if the Duo were to reinitialise the metadata.
Hey @sthurston
You should protect your existing data with minimal risk. The working drive contains critical information that must be preserved first. The most important initial step is to create a complete backup of the existing drive before attempting any hardware manipulations.
You can put your old drive in the enclosure, but it won’t reconfigure into RAID 1 automatically since it doesn’t have a software or hardware RAID controller. You’ll need to set it up manually or use RAID reconstruction software compatible with the My Book Duo.
Thanks, guys. I didn’t feel I could take the risk of permanently losing the data, so I took it in to a recovery company. One of the drives had a head crash onto the platter. They couldn’t simply restore it from the other drive because of the WD encryption. Frickin’ encryption. Anyway, they were able to recover the data, and for their services and the cost of a new drive, I’ll get it all back.
Please no lectures about data backup. Due to an error on my part, I was backing up a different drive - twice. The one that hasn’t failed. Not to mention that I want to buy two new replacement drives for the drives that haven’t failed, because they aren’t Spring chickens either, at this point.
