I recently bought the PR2100 and 2 brand new EXOS enterprise disks 10TB and everything was sailing smoothly (RAID 1) until 2 days ago. Out of the blue Disk 2 degraded.
Upon noticing I immediately hibernated the system and took out Disk 2. I got a new 10TB via warranty and put in the new drive and booted the system only to find that No RAID is shown configured. Clicking configure RAID does nothing and disk check functionality is greyed out. the unit shows all blue lights.
I’ve went through chat and nothing they could solve so I’m doing a RMA.
however, I’m getting pretty nervous as I now only have 1 back and it’s not loading the volume in the PR2100.
Disk 1 appears fine and I’ve connected it to my computer and can see it’s functional but cant read anything since it’s encrypted. I’ve tried system restore, leaving just Disk 1 in the unit, nothing works.
For context, i’ve got my unit hooked up to a UPS and no prior issues, latest firmware.
yes, my biggest mistake was not making my 3rd copy for offsite, i was waiting for a sale on the 3rd 10TB drive and was not expecting a drive to fail within 30 days (I stress tested).
Any chance anyone has run into this?
I’ve stopped trying to troubleshoot as i keep adding cycles to the one drive.
I’ve ordered a offline clone dock while i RMA the unit but really hope i didnt lose 2 disks…
I have the same issue and situation – have replaced drive 1 and when rebooted shows “need to configure Raid” but when I step through that process it tells me it will erase all data, Had been using Raid 1 thinking that if one drive failed, the other would still be available. Any ideas how to get data from Drive 2? My assumption had been that when I replaced Drive 1 that the system would have replicated Drive 2 … what do I need to do?
To start, I have read conflicting information stating whether or not to shut down the unit when a drive fails.
official support docs states to shut down the unit and swap drives then power up. However, I’ve also come across instances where people kept the unit on and turned on Auto rebuild then hot swapped the bad drive with a new drive and it rebuilt smoothly.
With that being said, the first method works based on the assumption that that the good drive is remounted properly at boot up. Why the unit may lockup and not correctly mount is beyond me but it happens hence, you and i having this issue.
Good new and bad news, good news is your data on Drive 2 is intact and should be good. The bad news is that you’re going to have to determine how to extract that data. If you have a offline backup (that 3rd backup) then you can skip this all and simply rebuild everything using that. If not, if you had turned on encryption then find the key you created. if you don’t remember or lost it the data is not recoverable and is gone. if you didnt encrypt then this gets simpler since you would just need to mount the drive to a computer via sata or usb and use something like linux reader to see all files. Back to encrypted, if the disk was encrypted it becomes trickier since you’ll need to find the right recovery software to mount and decrypt the disk. it’s possible linux reader may have a solution for this.
Based on my experience, I only had my 1 Disk with no back up. As a result, I ended up folking up $500 for data recovery because I panicked. Looking back I likely could have avoided it if I had a Disk Cloner unit, spare drives and time. If your drive happen to be seagate and is within warranty then that may be a recover option.
if you want to DIY then make sure you clone the original drive and play using the cloned drive.
I’ll admit I am disappointed in this product. However, I should also have been using the 3-2-1 backup rule.
I did RMA my unit and it’s been running smoothly the past 30 days. I now have disks ready for hot swapping, drive cloner, and that 3rd back up.
I ended up paying for data recovery.
However, see my notes above. As long as you have your encryption keys I would just buy a Drive Cloner and look for software that can mount the drive and then decrypt it and you should see all your files.
If these are critical files, I would clone the good drive first and then play with it.
I learned my lesson the hard way. Raid 1 is not a really backup solution. It helps, but it’s crucial to use the 3-2-1 back Rule. With one being an unencrypted copy.
I’ve been smooth sailing (Knock on wood) since this happened 2 years ago.
I use the USB backup app and back up to a docked hard drive every 3 weeks/ Month. Unfortunately, we got unlucky on the first go at it.
Last edit, When i received my RMA I ran the setup, then updated to the latest firmware, then factory reset, then started fresh. Unclear if maybe the initial firmware used to configure maybe the culprit.
