JamesBallenger.com

james August 22nd, 2010

I ordered a ReadyNAS Pro (RNDP6000) and filled it with 6 Western Digital 2TB drives (WD20EADS-32S2B0) that were on the Netgear compatibility list. I immediately ran into a few issues.

I installed the WD drives in the ReadyNAS, plugged it in and installed the RIADar tool on my primary workstation. On first boot with the brand new drives in place, I could not connect to the ReadyNAS. I pushed the power button for 5 seconds and restarted the ReadyNAS which came up and I went through the setup process thought RAIDar, then the web but was never asked about my raid choice. This being my first time using the device, this just seemed odd. After setup, I received an error message to the effect of “No volumes exist.” I called support at 3am on a Saturday and got a foreign fellow who spoke english well and was well informed. He had me shut the device down and then reboot with the reset button in the back held in with a paper clip. I then went through the menu option with the backup button on the front to select Factory Default. I pressed the reset button with the paperclip on the back again to select this option. After the reboot, I was able to choose setup with RAIDar and choose X-RAID2 with dual redundancy (a flexible RAID6 basically).

After this was established, I had an error with one of the drives. It took me some time but after swapping drive positions and playing with a few settings, I concluded that the netgear frontview (web) status messages were correct in that the drive was dead/had errors.

Moving on, I needed to upgrade a TiVo on my network to a 1TB drive. I realized that I needed to change the intelligent drive parking on the TiVo drive (WD10EVDS) and the WD20EADS, so I might as well do them at the same time.

Link for WD Diag Tool -> Western Digital Diagnostic Tool V 1.21
Link for WDidle3 -> Western Digital Idle / Parking tool V1.05 (wdidle3)
Link for WDTLER -> Western Digital TLER Tool (Raid Tool)
Link for bootable iso with WDidle3 & WDTLER -> Bootable CD (ISO) with wdidle3 & wdtler
Link for WinMFS Beta 9f -> WinMFS Beta 9f

Steps to get TiVo migrated:
1. Unplug TiVo, get a T10 torx wrench and open it up and pull out drive.
2. Burn bootable iso with WD Tools. Turn off computer, open up computer and hook up WD10EVDS drive to sata & power inside workstation. If you have WD drives in your workstation, you might want to disconnect them now.
3. Boot computer with bootable cd in drive & immediately go straight to the bios. In my case, I had to turn AHCI mode off, SATA Native port mode off & IDE Controller / compatibility mode on. Make sure your bios is set to boot from CD!
4. Hit enter to enter tools at boot prompt for fdos. Type wdidle3 then enter. It should report that your WD10EVDS drive(s) have this setting on and set to 8 seconds. Type wdidle3 /D then enter. It should report the idle setting is disabled.
5. Remove the boot CD and turn off computer. Connect any workstation drives that you disconnected before. Connect your original TiVo drive.
6. Turn computer on and be damn sure you go into the bios first and turn back on AHCI mode, Native ports and turn off IDE controllers if these were your original settings.
7. Once bios settings are saved and you have rebooted into Windows, install the WinMFS tools (you can use dos based tools too). Basically select your source and destination and copy. Once done, expand the data to the new drive. Turn off the computer.
8. Unplug the WD10EVDS and go install it in the TiVo. Put the old TiVo drive away for safe-keeping just in case of disaster or failure. Close up computer. Hook up TiVo. Done!

Steps to get ReadyNAS working with WD20EADS drives with wdidle3 and TLER on.
1. Burn bootable iso with WD Tools. Turn off computer, open up computer and hook up WD20EADS drive(s) to sata & power inside workstation [I did two drives at a time]. If you have WD drives in your workstation, you might want to disconnect them now.
2. Boot computer with bootable cd in drive & immediately go straight to the bios. In my case, I had to turn AHCI mode off, SATA Native port mode off & IDE Controller / compatibility mode on. Make sure your bios is set to boot from CD!
3. Hit enter to enter tools at boot prompt for fdos. Type wdidle3 then enter. It should report that your WD10EVDS drive(s) have this setting on and set to 8 seconds. Type wdidle3 /D then enter. It should report the idle setting is disabled.
4. Type TLERSCAN and hit enter. This should report the TLER settings which are likely disabled on your drives. If you type TLER_ON and then enter, it will run the command WDtler -r7 -w7. Some people recommend only using a read setting of 7 seconds so you could type WDtler -r7 and that would be fine.
5. Turn off machine and rotate drives as necessary to operate on all drives. Remove the boot CD and turn off computer. Connect any workstation drives that you disconnected before.
6. Turn computer on and be damn sure you go into the bios first and turn back on AHCI mode, Native ports and turn off IDE controllers if these were your original settings.
7. Go put drives back in ReadyNAS now with the idle park setting disabled and with TLER on (for proper raid response to avoid the raid dropping drives)!

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