Swapping external USB drives on NSA310

m4r10

I have a 3TB external drive hooked up to the NSA310 but want to swap it with a 5TB one. I have all files transferred to the new drive. My question is how do I go ahead and disconnect the old drive so it can be recognized by a PC? I tried connecting it to the PC but the drive is not recognized. Do I have to format it beforehand?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Ste-

if you've transferred files from two external drives both should be recognised by the PC.
What format are the partitions on the drives ?
Both are external drives yes ?

m4r10

The first external is hooked to the NAS, was formatted through the NAS interface. The second drive is hooked to PC at the moment just so I could transfer the files.
My guess the first one should be formatted again through NAS to be recognised by the PC, but I'm not sure about that.

ED E

The nas may understand ext3(and maybe fat) but not NTFS. The PC will understand NTFS but not ext3.

Make an independent copy of your data elsewhere, then use the NAS to format the drive it will use and the PC to format the drive it'll use.

You could use FAT that both should normally understand, but its not compatible with files larger than 4GB so its not advisable.

m4r10

The old external connected to the NAS was formatted initially through NAS interface in order to be recognised. What I have difficulties with is I can't get the old external recognised anymore by PC. I used NTFS again (from NAS interface) erasing all data on the old drive but with no success.
I can see the drive on the computer management screen, but all options are greyed out, such as format, delete partition, etc.

m4r10

m4r10 wrote: »

The old external connected to the NAS was formatted initially through NAS interface in order to be recognised. What I have difficulties with is I can't get the old external recognised anymore by PC. I used NTFS again (from NAS interface) erasing all data on the old drive but with no success.
I can see the drive on the computer management screen, but all options are greyed out, such as format, delete partition, etc.

Can you use diskpart from the cmd line or maybe use a live linux cd to format it with gparted...

gctest50

There's a telnet backdoor into the nas

http://zyxel.nas-central.org/wiki/Telnet_backdoor

enable that, then you can go in and see what's wrong

ED E

m4r10 wrote: »

The old external connected to the NAS was formatted initially through NAS interface in order to be recognised. What I have difficulties with is I can't get the old external recognised anymore by PC. I used NTFS again (from NAS interface) erasing all data on the old drive but with no success.
I can see the drive on the computer management screen, but all options are greyed out, such as format, delete partition, etc.

NoDrama wrote: »

Can you use diskpart from the cmd line or maybe use a live linux cd to format it with gparted...

This, you can forcibly delete the entire partition structure from diskpart and then format it normally.

m4r10

Tried diskpart, but PC won't assign any letter to the drive formatted through NAS interface, so diskpart is no help. (check screenshot, the greyed one is the HD in question, compared with all the options available for any of the other drives)

As for the telnet backdoor, everything is OK on the NAS side, the external HD shows just fine there.

I'm going to try a live linux cd, but I'm at the end of my patience with this.

ED E

It doesnt need a drive letter, that only happens when a disk mounts.

You do it via drive NUMBER.

Read here:
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/207837en?language=en_US

Also time to get off XP.

m4r10

Thanks for that, I have the drive formatting ATM by another method, but if it's not working, I'll try the method from the link.

I formatted the HD as a EXT4 from the NAS interface, then used Ext2Mgr program to assign a letter to it, and finally was seen in Windows. Should've ticked the Quick Format option instead, now I'll have to wait until morning for it to finish.

As for XP, I'm perfectly fine with it. I would change over to newer ones, but as the saying goes: if it's not broken, don't fix it! On top of that, I have a 7.1 audio system hooked up to an internal PCI card, which I won't be able to use it in any of the new PCs, so I'll stick with it for another while.

PS. It works with the method I tried on, so happy days.
Thanks for all the help guys.