MyBook Duo + RAID - How to exploit redundancy to recover from a bad idea

[cheTesta]

A while ago I had the bad idea of formatting the RAID 1 of My Book Duo as exFAT.

Since then I’ve populated the hard drives almost by 70%, and now exFAT is giving me sometimes headaches, leading me to seek for reformatting the unit with a journaled filesystem.

I unfortunately do not have any hard drive to use as second leg so I was looking to  exploit disk redundancy of raid but I’m not sure on how to handle the process, as I want not to break the raid.

 

What’s the proper way to do it?

 

1- remove one of the two disks
2- mount it alone to check if data is readable
3- keep it as data source drive
4- mount old drive. this will be a degraded raid drive.

5- wipe and format disk 2 (the one still inside my external device) to a journaled filesystem
6- move data on the freshly formatted drive (disk 1 or source --> disk 2)

8- rebuild the raid from disk 2 onto the

 

Am I missing something? Since RAID is managed by the box, do I need to take care of RAID meta?

 

Thanks

[SSD Sean]

You should be able to do that. I’ve done it before with a raid 6. And I’ve gone from one drive to a RAID 0 while maintaining the data on the source drive with IRST too. I’d highly, highly reccommend you back up first...if you don’t have a back up drive nows the time to get one.

[jj9987]

I don't think you can build a RAID on a disk, that already has some data on it. But I may be wrong here.

 

You could use some sort of cloud storage as a temporary place to hold files. Amazon S3 for example, where you only pay for the capacity and time you keep your files for.

[Snipergod87]

22 minutes ago, jj9987 said:

I don't think you can build a RAID on a disk, that already has some data on it. But I may be wrong here.

 

You could use some sort of cloud storage as a temporary place to hold files. Amazon S3 for example, where you only pay for the capacity and time you keep your files for.

Depends on the system/ software, but often times the answer is a no.