ReadyNas NV+ stuck at "Booting..." (case 17353032)

[mdgm]

Have you opened a tech support case? They may be able to assist.

The Duo (v1) and NV+ (v1) are the last ReadyNAS models available (still being produced by NetGear earlier this year) to not have a "Test Disks" boot option.

[zappo]

I have not opened a support ticket, thought this was support, the units are not new but the drives have a five year warranty.

I bought 3 or 4 of these units for my former employer and one for myself.

[mdgm]

This is the forum. Not one tech support rep has posted in this thread.

I would suggest opening a tech support case.

If you purchased your unit on/after Aug 21, 2007 it would still be under warranty.

[zappo]

OK Some progress.

I have kept the four drives safe until I can find a way to verify if there is a fault.

I took a set of identical 750gb drives from a readynas NV that had a faulty drive 3 (light flashed) stuck them in my ReadyNasNV+ and it correctly said that drive 3 faulty.

So why can't it determine whether any of drives have failed.

I saw another thread where there was an identical symptoms (the blue light glows like slow breathing), but the guy got some bad advice and lost all his data.

So what to do from here, I tried the Seagate tools but they do not work with Win7 and the Seagate ISO does not boot.

The other thread said I should NEVER stick a replacement drive in unless I know which one is faulty as it will cause a Sync problem, yet reading various threads it seems to me that what may be wrong is that one of the drives is out of sync.

It seems that if you boot with three drives and one of them is still faulty it will put the two drives out of sync with the good drive that was out of the machine.

So what now?

Why on earth can't the Netgear NV+ see which drive is causing the problem.

Does the fact that it worked with the other NAS units disks suggest that there is a problem with the firmware on the disks and if so how do I fix this without risking the data?

[mdgm]

There may only be the one bad disk and the NAS may boot fine with just the 3 good disks installed (monitor the NAS in RAIDar).

However if you are still not comfortable with that you could clone the disks e.g. using dd_rescue in Linux onto new good disks. That way if something goes wrong you have another copy of each of your disks.

Have you tried contacting NetGear support yet?

[zappo]

Yes but which 3 disks and is there a potential of putting them out of sync if I load the wrong three?

I have not contacted them about disks but have about PSU's they were supposed to come back to me but I got busy and did not chase them, will do tomorrow.

Am I right in thinking that the problem MAY be the OS install on the drives is corrupt?

[mdgm]

Ah so the NAS hasn't indicated there is a bad disk? A problem on the OS partition could lead the NAS to get stuck on booting.

[zappo]

Where is the OS partition stored, on the NAS unit or on the disks?

Did I read somethere that there is a way to do a non destructive restore of the OS?

[mdgm]

The OS partition is on the disks.

An OS Re-install is the restore you're referring to. See http://www.readynas.com/kb/faq/boot/how_do_i_use_the_boot_menu

[zappo]

OK we are making PROGRESS!

I held the reset switch at the back in and powered up until the LCD said OS Install and I let go of the button.

It did it's thing and rebuild the OS across the drives, it then complained of no network attached so I plugged in a crossover cable.

I expected it to reset to the 192.168.168.x subnet but it remembered my subnet, it did reset the password to factory default.

I was actually working on it with a laptop so I changed the IP address of the laptop NIC to one in the range of the Subnet the Nas remembered.

I then ran Raidar and it found the unit.

Disk1 was flashing and Raidar reported that Raid resync was started on Volume C

It says it is going to take another 8 hours to complete that so fingers crossed!

So I thought I ought to do something about the power supplies, 3 of my 5 units have burnt out and I heard that Netgear was replacing units with Serial No.s between 585525-53470 and 585525-73952 even after the warranty has expired.

Well I had to convert the numbers on the unit which are in hex e.g. (D-A201-4D2A) from hex to decimal to figure out if they are in the range, all five were in the range.

I called Netgear and their number had changed, got through to right team and BINGO they agreed to replace them with no quibble, I agreed to fit them myself which is no trouble.

It is sensible of Netgear to replace these free because they had done a recall and that makes them liable, if a unit was to burn out and caused a fire they could be held responsible.

Well HATS OFF to Netgear!

So today is a good day!

BIG thanks to MDGM

One thing, is there any benefit in moving to V4 of the Bios?

[mdgm]

Do you mean RAIDiator 4.x? If so, yes.

Don't update in the middle of a resync though.

After ensuring you have an up to date backup update the firmware.

RAIDiator 4.x includes lots of nice improvements, new features etc. It works much better with newer OSes too. There's very limited support that can be provided if you choose to stay on RAIDiator 3.x (several years old firmware)

There's plenty of add-ons too (e.g. EnableRootSSH - useful if familiar with and comfortable using Linux shell commands) and plenty of other addons including lots of community ones.

The latest firmware supports 2TB drives whereas RAIDiator 3.x firmware is limited to a 2TB volume.

After updating to the latest firnware and ensuring you have an up go date backup I suggest you do a factory default. This will wipe all data, settings, everything and give you a clean setup on the latest firmware with some nice performance benefits and 4k sector partition alignment.