Moving drives and reinstalling the OS

[OzCam]

Asking before I try....

if i unplug all drives except /volume1 and reinitialise/reformat/reinstall the OS on those disks, can I just reconnect my other data drives and have them recognised?

I seem to have read some stuff (and it seems from playing round) that there isnt a way to do this?

I guess i could plug them in and use the cli mdadm to reactivate the drives and use btrfs send / rec to copy the data, but that seems ugly and horrible (and coping that much data takes aaages)

Im hoping there is some clever way to just recognise the drives as coming from an old install and overwrite partitions 1-3 and just use partition 4.

[OzCam]

I migrated data and removed an old single disk volume. I plugged it into a new linuxbox but using mdadm --run on partition 4 wouldnt mount and I couldnt see what i expected would be an empty partition. Instead it just wouldnt mount.

I pulled (reather than removed) one of the mirrored /volume1 drives (as part of an expansion) and that is readable.

So Im assuming that removing a volume nukes nukes the data on the drive on 'remove' in ADM?

[orion]

if i unplug all drives except /volume1 and reinitialise/reformat/reinstall the OS on those disks, can I just reconnect my other data drives and have them recognised?

"reinitialise/reformat/reinstall the OS on those disks" and "reconnect my other data drives" are conflicted. I guess you mean you deleted all volumes, except volume1. And you want to put back the disks of volume 2. The answer is no.

So Im assuming that removing a volume nukes nukes the data on the drive on 'remove' in ADM?

If you shutdown NAS first then unplug disks, insert to Ubuntu PC, you should be able to get your data back.