General NAS-Central Forums

After following Mijzelf's instructions for the first disk, I made a raw image of the 2,008,221 sectors of the disk -- roughly the first 1GB. I then used the image to copy these sectors to the four other disks, thus making the 2,008,221 first sectors of the five disks identical. I put the five disks back in the 5Big Network and booted it. It booted all right and I could connect to the web interface.

Here is the expected Windows-only How to.
You will need a Windows PC with a free SATA disk cable on which you will plug the five disks one after the other. The PC should be off when you plug or unplug a disk.
1/ Plug the first disk and boot the PC.
2/ Download the zipped raw disk image (I have temporarily uploaded it here http://dl.free.fr/p0oaKzTq5 md5=73ab36492d84ce08313196810c6ed748. How shall I upload it to downloads.lacie.nas-central.org?)
3/ Double-click in Windows explorer to unzip it to the folder of your choice. I'll refer later to the full path to this folder as [full path to your image folder]. This is about 60MB zip and 1GB unzipped.
4/ Download dd for Windows from http://www.chrysocome.net/dd. It comes as a zip. Unzip it in the folder of your choice. I'll refer later to the full path to this folder as [full path to your dd folder]

Warning: in the next steps, you will use dd to overwrite the first sectors of each of the five 5Big Network disks. While doing this, if you target the wrong disk, you may irrecoverably lose data and/or you may need to re-install Windows from scratch. Make sure you use with great care.

In an elevated command prompt,
5/ Navigate to [full path to your dd folder] using the cd command
6/ Run dd --list and identify the target disk from the list of devices. In the next step, the name of the target disk will be referred to as [target disk]

7/ Run dd if=[full path to your image folder]\2008221.img of=[target disk] --progress
Code example:

8/ When done, switch the PC off, replace the disk with the next target disk, switch the PC back on. Then resume at step 5 and so on until every target disk has the new image. And voila.

Important note: the image was prepared for 2TB disks. If you use other disk sizes, you will need to adjust the size of the second primary partition.
For the geeks, that means amending the value stored in the four bytes at offset 0x01DA-0x01DD to match the actual number of sectors in the second primary partition. You may use any disk hex editor like http://mh-nexus.de/downloads/HxDen.zip to achieve this. For primary partition table documentation, you may refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record.
For the faint-hearted, you may use a partition manager among this selection http://www.techsupportalert.com/content ... tion_Guide, and resize the very large partition at the end of the disk.
I have not tested this very last step. Use at your own risk