Hard Drive Reformat (or not?)

Hello, I've been looking through google and going in circles. Maybe my terminology is wrong and is why I cant find what I need. I hope someone here can help me.

I have a couple of WD 3B red drives. I had them in my old NAS (Netgear ReadyNAS duo). It started playing up so have now bought the 102 version with the intention of putting my WD drives in it. It didn't work. So, I took the drives out and deleted the partitions using a Win 7 64 machine and disk management. Now I have a drive with unallocated space of about 750GB on my 3TB drives - I know they'll only be about 2.7TB when formatted properly rather than whatever disaster I've done to them

I'm really wanting to format (or not?) these back to the drives as they came from the factory and were new and sealed. That way, I should be able to install them into my new NAS and it'll take care of everything for me. At the moment, my NAS doesn't recognise them at all - aaarrrghhh

Luckily, I backed up all info days before the issue so data loss will be very minimal and I'm not worried about that. Just how to get these drives back to a non existent state that I can put them in my new NAS and it'll run through everything for me and I can get back to networked data and media on my new NAS

Fingers crossed

Thanks for any and all help

According to the manual (p. 66) you have to install the disks then set the NAS back to its factory defaults. The disks should then be formatted automatically. It also tells you how to import disks from another setup, but it's probably too late to do that now that you have deleted the partitions.

When I had the ReadyNas Duo they only supported 2GB hard drives, please check if this is still the case. You maybe able to partition them like before, but make sure they are formatted as MBR devices and not GPT as I doubt the ReadyNAS will support that.

Do you mean 2TB drives?

Those drives are listed as supported. I would guess that, as with most NAS devices, it will partition and format the drives, probably using ext4 or something similar. These boxes normally run Linux so they'd have no problem with non-MBR partitions.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

Do you mean 2TB drives?

Yes, sorry, 2TB

In reply to a post by AEP:

Those drives are listed as supported. I would guess that, as with most NAS devices, it will partition and format the drives, probably using ext4 or something similar. These boxes normally run Linux so they'd have no problem with non-MBR partitions.

The legacy product ReadyNAS duo only supported up to 2TB from what I've just read, yet the ReadyNAS duo V2 does show as 3TB supported, not sure exactly what the differences are.

http://www.readynas.com/?page_id=82

If I have had problems in the past with my Buffalo NAS is just delete the partitions , insert them and let the NAS do the partitioning and formatting, or format them using a Linux CD distro.

Only 2TB drives were supported, but I don't suppose that bigger ones were common when the original product was released. From the OP's experience, 3TB drives did work in that version. Linux has supported larger drives for ages, long before they actually existed (other than in RAID arrays or SANs).