Repurpose NTFS hard drive for My Cloud EX2

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX2
1

Hi,

I bought a My Cloud EX2, thinking I could re-purpose a couple of WD 1TB drives that I had kicking around.

I was using these drives in a Windows environment so they are formatted NTFS (I dont mind/need the information currently stored in them though).

However when I inserted one of these drives in the NAS I can’t format them.

First, I tried the GUI > Settings > Utilities > Format but it’s grayed out, so no go.

Then I downloaded and tried WD’s “My Cloud EX2 Setup software”. It detects the NAS and check marks the drive as soon it’s inserted, but when I click “Format” it stays at 0% for hours (even overnight). No progress.

Also when I power up the NAS diskless, the power LED is steady blue, but after I insert the drive it goes flashing yellow and the drive LED goes flashing red.

I know the disks ar OK, I was using them in other hardware. Is there any other way to format these drives to be used by the NAS?

2

Welcome to the Community.

What are the specifications of these hard drives? As a recommendation you could try writing zeros to the hard drives to destroy the partition table and file system, making them behave as new drives.

3

One drive is a 1TB WD10EARS (green). The other is a 2TB Seagate Barracuda.

Any recommendation for a tool that could write zeros to the whole disk? If using Windows command line format with option /p:1, what /fs: option should I use {FAT | NTFS | exFAT | UDF}?

Thanks!

4

Here you go:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1211/

On the other hand, different hard drives may be incompatible in a RAID array. This could very well be the problem here.