12TB PRO Business Ed: No Volumes Found

[russrtw]

I was resyncing the volume on a PRO, and was on the 3rd disk (of 6 total) when it froze on "59% complete". We were doing the resync to "realign" the volume to work with the WD 2TB "Black" drives with 4K sectors (fixed in 4.2.13).

Power cycled it, now shows no volumes and logged the following:

The paths for the shares listed below could not be found. Typically, this occurs when the ReadyNAS is unable to access the data volume.

Any remedy for this other than factory reset? 5TB of business data on it, fortunately some of it was backed up via Vault, but will still take forever for restore.

I'm calling partner support line first, but figured I would post something up here as well

[russrtw]

Oh, and was running 4.2.15 when performing the resync

[TeknoJnky]

were you running single or dual redundancy?

from what I remember of past posts regarding similar issues were caused by a second disk failure during a resync. ie 2 disks failed in raid 5 (which obviously only supports 1 disk failing).

depending on the circumstances, it may (or may not) be possible for support to manually restart/reset the resync, so I would make sure you do contact support asap before panic sets in and things get worse for you

[russrtw]

Single, but it was simply doing a resync of the volume when the PRO completely froze (for some unknown reason). Of course this wasn't the first time it's frozen.

We'll see what support says

[russrtw]

Ticket went up to Level3 support @ Netgear. Turns out we might be able to sync the rest of the drives and restore the full operation of the volume. I'll find out more later this evening

[TeknoJnky]

its likely that it froze due to a drive silently failing (or being too slow to commit a write)

the fact that its not the first time its frozen indicates to me that its been a problem for a while

hopefully the techs will be able to perform whatever magic is needed to get you back up and running, but afterwards I would recommend powering off and doing manufacturer tests on each of the drives to see if more than one drive is acting up

also, in the future you might consider dual redundancy, yes it costs an additional drive worth of space, but its well worth the peace of mind and time saved in a backup/restore operation

[russrtw]

Thanks for the advice:

When I say it's "frozen" in the past... I should have said that FrontView becomes unavailable (although you can still access the shares and SSH into it). This apparently is a known problem. This Pro is only about 4 months old, and FrontView was unresponsive even with the original two drives it shipped with. Seemed like it happened after a week or two of use, then power cycling it restored it each time.

This was the first time it froze completely, and this was after the 1st drive synced successfully... although it got 59% through the second before biting the dust.

In this case, the dual-redundancy wouldn't have helped since it wrote the wrong sync information to all the drives (according to the support). The logs are very strange.

Customer didn't want to lose an additional 2TB for additional redundancy in this case. Now the 4200 with 12 drives is another story, which I think it defaults to dual-redundancy when using X-RAID2 anyway.

[TeknoJnky]

well as I am sure your aware, resyncs are stressful for all drives, not just the drive being resynced.

when they recommended resyncing drives to re-align 4k partitions, I wondered how many people will do this and have problems due to the stressfull nature of back to back resyncs. I mean when you think about it, your purposely degrading and rebuilding the array multiple times to achieve this.

anyway, hopefully you and/or your customer have taken proper backups/precautions for this particular situation and/or will in the future to avoid any data loss

[russrtw]

Assumed they were yes, but was following instructions based on the 4.2.13 RAIDiator update to realign the array for 4K sector drives.

We have everything backed up. RSynced data to another ReadyNAS provided immediate recovery needs while the vault services provided the necessary backup... this is all of course if we HAVE to restore.