How to re-do the hard disks in a WD Word Book Edition II?

I recently purchased a WD World Book II, a 2 TB one. I call it the "White Box". It has those 2 1TB drives, and they were in this RAID 1 config, only giving me about 1 TB. I could not delete the raid array, and I took the drives in a Linux box. But I also deleted the entire partitions of the disks, and I cannot even et the existing RAID array on this WD White Box. The drives are fine, but I cannot get them to work on the WD White Box.

My goal was to get back to a real 2 TB storage space. If I cannot get those drives back in the White Box, I can re-use them elsewhere, but this would mean a waste of the firmware and network connection. After the fact, I read that, anyway, the network performance is rather poor.

jfmessier

Posted 2010-05-30T02:05:22.517

Reputation: 2 530

Answers

If I read that correctly, you want your external RAID hardware to be set back to the mode that lets you take advantage of the whole 2 TB space.

My brother got a similar WD drive. When it was brand new, it was set up as RAID 0 which let us take advantage of the whole 2 TB. With RAID 0, if one drive dies, then you lose all your data. With RAID 1, one drive can die, and you keep all the data. When I was going through the WD RAID options, I did not see an option to disable RAID so that you can access each drive individually.

So, I'm assuming you want to switch it back to RAID 0. You will need the installation CD that came with the drive. You can then install the WD software which will let you change the settings in the WD firmware. If you don't have the CD, you can probably download the software you need from here: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=118&lang=en

James T

Posted 2010-05-30T02:05:22.517

Reputation: 8 515

My problem, I think, is that the system is not responding. Also, on the CD, there is NO software for Windows. There is only software for MAC, and I don't have a MAC. I will check the actual URL you left in your email to see whether there is actual software in it. I could access all the menus described in the "software" manual, accessing the URL in the browser, but the WD box is not responding to http anymore. – jfmessier – 2010-05-31T11:43:35.783

According to the manual for the MyBook World Edition (page 43), to reformat the drives, follow these instructions:

Log into the Shared Storage Manager
Click Drive Management
Click "Format new internal drive"

To change between RAID 1 and RAID 0, see page 42 of the manual:

Click Drive Management
Click "Change drive type"

Stephen Jennings

Posted 2010-05-30T02:05:22.517

Reputation: 21 788

This is the first thing I tried, going through the menus, as described. But I got an error message, that I found in many forums. Of course, this was once I bought the box. If I knew about this configuration, I would not have purchased this hardware. I wanted 2 TB, in a networked connection, not USB. – jfmessier – 2010-05-31T11:48:42.933