ReadyNAS Duo with no available disk space

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My new Netgear ReadyNAS Duo was delivered at lunchtime today. This is the second ReadyNAS Duo I’ve bought and the first is happily serving media and other files to my home network, whereas this one is intended to be hacked so that it can become an inexpensive iSCSI target (I hope).

I bought the RND2000 (i.e. the model with no disks installed) as I already have a spare 500MB disk from the first ReadyNAS (which has since been upgraded to use a pair of 1TB Seagate Barracudas) and NetGear’s current offer of a free hard drive will allow me to make this single disk one half of a RAID 1 mirror. After setting up the device via the web interface (FrontView), I discovered that the disk was detected as full with 0MB (0%) of 0GB used.

There were no options to erase the disk, but I had previously been using this disk in a Windows Server computer so I mounted it on a Windows PC where it was recognised and I was able to delete the existing partition. After putting the disk back into the ReadyNAS, the RAIDar utility showed that it was creating a volume (eventually I could see that Volume C: had been created, with 0% of 461GB used) although it seems that I had also wiped my configuration along with the NTFS partition (that was straightforward enough to set up again).

RAIDar showing new volume creation on a ReadyNAS