At last - exactly the problem I'm facing. Well, almost exactly.
MBWE(white), about 18 months old ; while I was working abroad, wife notices she can't find our photos collection any more. I get back and find that the MBWE is sitting silent, one front bar light lit (at the top, oddly), the network status light on the RJ-45 socket is on, but the DHCP server in the router has no entry for the MBWE and I can't ping it (or anything more).
Today I got a USB-SATA box ; the drive mounts. I get an appropriate set of results from cfdisk and melao's hint above has got me part way up the greasy pole of manually managing RAID arrays.
root@aidank-laptop:/media# mdadm --assemble --scan
mdadm: /dev/md0 has been started with 1 drive (out of 2).
mdadm: /dev/md1 has been started with 1 drive (out of 2).
mdadm: /dev/md3 has been started with 1 drive (out of 2).
mdadm: /dev/md2 has been started with 1 drive (out of 2).
root@aidank-laptop:/media#
Now, how the blazes that works, I don't know.
Now, FTFM,
"If the —scan option is given, and no devices are listed, then
every array listed in the config file is considered for assembly.
The identity of candidate devices are determined from the config file."
"If mdadm can not find all of the components for an array, it will assemble
it but not activate it unless —run or —scan is given."
So I'll try it with the —run option …
root@aidank-laptop:/media# mdadm --assemble --scan --run
Whoa - I have three mounted drives! Which are …. FULL OF DATA !
COPY FEST!
Now all I need to worry about is getting the old machine fixed, or getting something else to do the job.
Can't imagine why WD's designers decided to set these things up with a configuration like this. But WTF, it works, and it's not difficult to work around.