2 Years of frustration for a product that does not work

[TC44]

First to caveat - I am 22 year IT professional in infrastructure and operations - I know what I am doing (not that the ReadyNas is rocket science).

- I have a ReadyNas Ultra 4 installed at my home to backup my PCs and iMac.
- When I first got the product about 2 years ago, it worked great. I copied and backed up all my Video files to the device.
- My problems started about a year ago or a little more where after shutting down and booting the device I have had many issues accessing the device since
- Device will boot but cannot access Frontview
- Device will boot, can access Frontview but cannot access file shares from PC
- Device will boot, but cannot access anything

- After giving up for a while I decided maybe I need to update the firmware. I got into FV and updated the firmware and then it would not boot
- At this point I opened a tech support ticket of which I was told was my ONE FREE call even though the unit was still under warranty - I won't go off about that one yet
- Tech Support walked me through the pinhole reset of the OS
- I was able to access everything after rebooting twice - thanked the helpful tech support and hung up
- Shut the unit down again to put it back on it's shelf, will not reboot - Just sat there stuck in Booting.....


So now I need to access teh files on the device and cannot get to them. Rebooting again has forced a FS Check and says it completes but then just says Booting...

I tried to do the OS reset again and when I do that it says something about a Cannot extract - corrupt.... So now it is completely not working and for me to call tech support will cost money. What a load of BS.....

I had a lot of respect for Netgear before I bought this $1000 hunk of crap.

[PapaBear]

First, the documentation that came with your unit plainly states that you have 90 days of free telephone support from the time you purchased your unit. This is to assist new owners in getting set up. After that point you have free online technical support for the life of the warranty.

Second, you refer to the use of the device to backup files from your PCs and iMac which it is good at. But then you state you need to access a file on the unit, which leads one to the conclusion you are also using it to store original files, not backup copies. I know backup can be a hassle, but this is the exact reason we say that one should never trust data to a single device, be it a single hard drive or a single RAID device.

Corrupt probably refers to a "corrupt root".

You best bet is to open an on line technical support ticket and hope that you can work with them to allow them to telenet in to the unit (although if it will not boot that is questionable) to save the data. They may also have other suggestions.

With a current and complete backup, it would be easy to simply perform a factory default, but that wipes all the data and reinstalls the OS. You would then restore the files from the backup.

Do you have files on the Ultra 4 that do not exist elsewhere?