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[zwief]

I have a DNS-320, P/N BNS320A.....A1, HW Ver. A1, firmware 2.03, two WD30EZRX-00MMMB0 (Western Digital 3TB) drives installed. Raid type is "Standard" for each drive.

I want to reformat just one drive (in an attempt to get Time Machine running on an iMac running Mac OS X 10.6.8 ). After logging into the web interface I click the "Management" button, then the "Disk Management" button then the "Hard Drive Configuration" item. Then under "Hard Drive Configuration" section I click the "Set RAID Type and Re-Format" button which opens the hard drive configuration wizard.

Here's where I start to worry. I want to reformat one of the two drives. There is a lot of data on the drive I do not want reformatted. It is only partially backed up and will take at least a couple days to do a full back up. So the consequences of accidentally reformatting it after backing up will be at least a two day data restore. I really want to avoid this!

So I get to step 3, Volume Configuration Summary and the configurator hasn't yet given me an option to select just one drive to format (both are listed with no way to select either one). I have three buttons to choose from, "previous," "format" and "exit." Of course, the only prudent choices are "previous" and "exit."

Am I stuck? Must I make a full backup, reformat both drives and then restore or is there some other way I can't see to select just one drive to format?

If I have to remove a drive, which is left and right between volume 1 and volume 2?

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated!

[ivan]

As you say, you don't have a full backup of your data which should be the first thing you should do just in case anything goes wrong.  I won't regale you with the number of people we see that didn't think they needed a backup - until something went wrong.

As to your problem.  As far as I remember the right hand slot is the Volume_1 slot.  This memory is from long ago when we first got a DNS-320 and did acceptance tests.  The other thing is that it will format both disks if they are both present but will give Volume_1 to any single drive which can cause problems if you later replace a formatted drive.

The safest way  would be for you to make a full backup, remove the drive with your data on it, format the remaining drive and reinsert the other drive and make adjustments to the volume label as necessary.  This does not guarantee that nothing will go wrong hence the need for the full backup.  I will also state we have not tried this because all our units, and those of our clients, are set to RAID 1 with auto rebuild if we need to replace a disk.     

[zwief]

Thanks Ivan. I guess I have a chunk of work ahead of me, but at least I won't have to wonder if there was an easier way.