D5-300 suddenly says drives are not initialized/must be formatted?

USB RAID storage for photographers, music producers, movie collectors
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IGagnon
Posts: 1
Joined: 21 Jun 2022, 23:51

D5-300 suddenly says drives are not initialized/must be formatted?

Post by IGagnon »

I have a D5-300. All 5 bays are populated with 4TB Iron Wolf Pro drives, running in RAID-5.

Purchased brand new on March 9th, 2022.

The RAID was at about 70% capacity and everything was working well. I use it as a staging drive for ingesting video footage into our main server.

I was using the drive 2 days ago and everything was operating normally. Since that time, the drive has not been powered down or disconnected from the PC.

This morning I went to pull some additional footage off the drives and Windows now claims that the drive is not initialized, and needs to be formatted.

The RAID Manager software that comes with the D5-300 also says the drives are connected, but it appears that it thinks the drives are all empty.

I have not formatted or deleted the RAID, it has been sitting idle on my desk since I last accessed it.

I have tried powering the enclosure down, disconnecting both power and USB, letting it sit for 10+ minutes and reconnecting/rebooting it. No difference.

I also tried the same procedure, but removed the drives and reseated them one-by-one in order to make sure the drives went back into their original slots. No change.

I'm assuming at this point that the hardware RAID controller has died or malfunctioned.

Does anyone else have additional troubleshooting steps?
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TMSupport
TerraMaster Team
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Joined: 13 Dec 2019, 15:15

Re: D5-300 suddenly says drives are not initialized/must be formatted?

Post by TMSupport »

1. Please open RAID Manager on Windows PC to check whether the RAID 5 is normal.
If it is displayed normally, it means that there is no problem with the RAID 5 you created.
2. Go to This Computer - Properties - Management - Disk Management. Check whether the hard disk partition of the D5-300 is normal. If it is abnormal or the file system format is changed, it means that the file system of hard disk partition created by your Windows has been damaged.
3. ExFAT format is not recommended for mass storage, NTFS is recommended.
Note: If the file system of partition has been damaged, it is recommended to use a third-party tool for data recovery.
To contact our team, please send email to following addresses, remember to replace (at) with @
Technical team: support(at)terra-master.com (for technical support)
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