Hello. I have one of these units that failed (not under warranty) so I am attempting to fix it. I disassembled the thing completely, cleaned everything inside, replaced the battery, reassembled the thing, reformatted the drives to ext4, reinserted the drives, powered the thing on, and now I have a solid blue power light and two solid red drive lights. The manual does not mention solid red drive lights, so I am asking about them via this ticket. I have three of these units and I believe two are still under warranty.
Also, what is the drive preparation procedure? Is it simply formatting ext4 and dropping them in? Is there any NAS software that needs to be loaded onto them prior to insertion?
With an EX2 ultra. . . .I would expect to drop in unformatted drive, and the firmware (which resides on the motherboard) will format the drive.
Solid blue means the unit is running.
Solid Red means dead drives.
In this case. . .it may mean that you have dropped in two freshly formatted drives and not initialized the Raid array.
What shows up on the NAS dashboard? You probably have to setup volumes and the raid array from the NAS dashboard
Thank you for that. I deleted the partitions from both drives via gparted, recreated the partition tables (gpt), dropped them back into the unit, and powered it on. The result was the same.
I then removed the drives again, recreated the partition tables (gpt), dropped them into a brand new unit, and powered it on. The result was the same.
At first I suspected that the first unit had failed, but now I am thinking one or both drives have failed? If one or both drives have failed, how can gparted still create partition tables, format, etc?
I don’t think you have to do ANYTHING to the drive prior to dropping them into the unit.
Step one: Drop the drives into the unit
Step two: Power it up.
Step three: Log into the NAS dashboard using your favorite web browser as the admin
Step four: Navigate to the appropriate utilities menu, and setup the NAS drive array.
Right now, the red lights “probably” means that the drives are not ready. . .because the NAS doesn’t know if these brand new drives it has never seen before are meant to be used as single volume, multiple volumes, raid1, Raid0, jbod. . . . .and is waiting for the admin to log in and “setup” the drives.
If you suspect the drives. . . you can hook them up to a PC outside the NAS and run S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics.
You could also drop the drives into one of your other NAS’s and setup the drives on those units. Then you are simply importing a “roaming raid array” over tot he problematic NAS. I really don’t advise this. . .as you are essentially messing with a perfectly fine running NAS.
I appreciate the suggestions, and I have completed the steps as prescribed with the addition of a smartctl -t long execution on each of the two drives prior to insertion (results linked below). I inserted the drives into the brand new enclosure. Again, the power light is solid blue and both drive lights are solid red.
wd-wx72d71nl7y3_smart.txt
wd-wxa2d7160dkf_smart.txt
When I go to the EX2’s dashboard, I get to the login screen but it says “Power was lost from the system. Performing file system consistency check. Please wait.” (screenshot below)
It would not allow me to log in at this point.
As I am writing this, a thought occurred to me. I decided to switch the power supply to the one that came with the new enclosure. VIOLA! Now, the drives work fine in both the original enclosure and the new one. I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing that before; such a rookie mistake!
Off to order a new power supply!
it’s sometimes the simplest things. . . .
