I’m troubleshooting a different problem, where the drive drops out every few hours, but in the meantime, I’ve broken my Raid1 array, and am not having any luck rebuilding it.
This is a WD Duo WDBLW series, with 2 x 2TB WD Red drives in Raid1 that have been running it it for a couple of years now, most recently with Windows 10.
I removed one drive and ran for a day to see if it would drop out, then tried the same thing with the other drive. Everything ran fine with either drive1 or drive2 installed; all data is accessible.
I then put both drives back in, and got a “cannot access data” message from the WD Drive Utilities dashboard. The drive doesn’t show up in Window, and the rebuild button is greyed out.
After this, the individual drives still read OK in the enclosure, but with both in, it won’t read or show up in Windows.
I pulled one out, initialized it in Windows with a USB adapter, and still get the same thing. Now one drive works fine. The other is recognized as part of the Raid array, but the data is gone, as expected. Erasing it in the WD Utilities didn’t help.
At this point, I just want to get the second drive in and rebuild it from the first drive.
Diskpart didn’t help. I tried multiple variations of cleaning and prepping the 2nd disk, with no results.
I also wiped it in the MyBook Duo enclosure by itself with no change, then re-initialized it in the enclosure by itself as JBOD (because I didn’t want to wipe out my good disk). I could then put both HDs in the enclosure and read the data from the original disk 1 RAID disk, but couldn’t start a rebuild using the second disk, which it still saw as JBOD. My only option was to re-create the RAID1 array, losing the data.
Eventually, I tried a spare 2TB Red that used to be in a different brand non-encrypted enclosure, and the Duo rebuilt to this disk with no problem. So, my original 2nd disk works by itself, is readable in either the Duo (when initialized/formatted in it) or on a USB adapter (when initialized/formatted by Win10), but won’t rebuild when added to the enclosure with disk 1 of a broken RAID1 array no matter what I do to it.
I’ll send a request to WD Support and see if they can help, but at this point, I believe I’ll migrate away from encrypted enclosures that require this kind of hoop-jumping. It’s too much drama for me.
Check the version of existing Disk Utility software, the latest version is 2.0.0.54. Further, try installing the latest version from WD Support website.
Click Here to download the latest version of WD Drive Utilities.
