Hi everyone,
Couple of days ago the red LED came on for DISK1 on my WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra (running OS 5). I bought a new drive (WD brand as listed in supported drives list) and swapped out DISK1 with the new drive and rebuilt the raid. All went fine and I was happily using the NAS once again.
Yesterday, I was no longer able to access Plex (running on the EX2 Ultra). I went into to the dashboard and turned the app OFF and then ON again. No dice. After checking multiple things; everything seemed to be fine; so I figured, “let’s give reboot a try.”… that seemed like a good idea at the time; so I did.
Once the NAS came back on, I was able to log into the dashboard and was immediately greeted with the “CAUTION” and drilling down into it I saw that the “RAID Profile” stated “No Configured Volumes”. My heart sank; because this to me seemed like a catastrophic issue and I am freaking out a bit; because the whole point of using a NAS with RAID 1 was to have redundancy at the cost of the space and speed.
Now I am looking to get my data back and not sure what to do? How can I get my data back or is it lost forever?
Any help will be greatly appreciated and thanks in advance.
Best,
Farhan
let’s talk after THREE reboots 
You can always pull out the drive and read it with a PC (using suitable software to read a linux EXT4 volume).
I am having the same problem. After replacing the drive and doing the RAID rebuild, there are now no shares available (on webui or the CLI). When attaching the old GOOD drive (that should have data on it), my Mac cannot read it. Did you ever resolve it?
Short answer is that, yes, I was able to get my data off of one of the drives and there is no way to get the NAS to recognize the drives without erasing the drives. The fault was not with either drives and the data was intact; just not accessible due to a corrupt file system.
Plugging the drive into the Mac won’t work because the macOS does not support EXT4 partition; at least it didn’t work for me. Therefore, I ended up purchasing UFS Explorer RAID Recovery (~150 USD) and bought a SATA to USB adapter (~28 USD) along with another 5 TB external drive (~60 USD) to restore the data to.
The software is pretty good; but takes a while (took about 8 hours for my 4 TB drive) to scan the drive and figure out what data is there. Once done it is as simple as selecting the folders and hitting restore.
One important thing to note is that the software had trouble restoring to the Apple
File System partition. Therefore, I had to use a drive with HFS+ partition and the restore went smoothly and the restore also takes a while (also about 8 hours for the 3.5 TB of data).
The long answer is that, to me, this issue is with the NAS OS; but WD support did not confirm this to be bug in their OS (I wasn’t expecting them to).
There is nothing wrong with the two drives, both the old and the new. The OS some how corrupted the file system after changing the drive and the RAID 1 configuration blindly copied the fault to the other drive. Something I think should not happen and the OS (or the RAID mechanism) should prevent this issue.
Good to know. Thanks.
I don’t have much experience with Linux and with my 3.5 TB data on the line I didn’t want to take any chances. The WD support didn’t provide any information on doing this; which also why I didn’t want go there.
Also I’m on macOS and that only has the Disk Utility which does not recognize Linux partitions; unless I mistaken.
Using USB backup APP to backup data to an external USB disk formatted to EXFAT
will give ability to connect that external disk to mac or pc and be read/write readable
or use windows only format and a use a program for the mac that can read that format.
I have use a Raspberry PI to read EXT4 2 mirrored wd nas disks
I even tried dual booting Linux on a old mac mini
There are more that one USB ports on many of the WD NAS unit.
