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524X Can't factory reset, help
Using 524X with firmware 6.10.9 Finally had a disk fail. the disk test option from front view reporting error, but no reasons given, smart status wasn't showing errors. well I tried to re...
yes I'm sure I did factory reset.
I did a lot of different things trying to get this working so its a little murky now what all I have tried, but I have tried factory reset numerous times including with all three disks and with only two disks.
I first did it with 3 disks inside after having done a boot menu disk test to discover disk#4 had errors and I removed it..
but it failed to reset with the remaining three drives, gave me an error message on the front of the readynas and in raidar a message about corrupt root. I did googling and found out this is normal, readynasOS is designed to not overwrite it if you have one or more other volumes, it will not erase the new third one if it thinks there might be some old valid data on it....ie...detects a root or detects certain partition or something like that.
I tried to also factory reset only with disk#3 and it also failed.
At some point I did it with only first two disks and that worked.
when I try to put disk 3 back in, it complains that in order to use it I must remove the first two "inactive" disks. I don't want to use it, I want to erase it. but readynas will not erase it or reset it.
I have already tried numerous times to DESTROY all known volumes and FORMAT each of the disks... but ultimately this third disk keeps coming back with a status that there is an old 16TB volume associated with it and does not want to be reset or erased.
but it failed to reset with the remaining three drives, gave me an error message on the front of the readynas and in raidar a message about corrupt root.
The factory reset reformats the disk and recreates the root. So either that process failed, or you accidentally did an OS reinstall.
when I try to put disk 3 back in, it complains that in order to use it I must remove the first two "inactive" disks.
No harm in removing them, since your goal is to reformat everything anyway. Then you can go to system->settings and do the factory default from there.
100% confidence I did not do reinstall. I did factory reset and I have done it now about five times. In this case it is absolutely NOT erasing the disk in question. I have tried to explain why already. I will find the article from netgear that explains why it’s not, but their suggestion to do factory reset is also not working on drive 3.
you are not understanding what I have written about the error messages. Remove the two working drives does not fix the problem. I already tried to do factory reset with only drive 3 present in slot 1 and that fails to erase it also. If I had a pc I would put drive 3 in there to diagnose and erase all partitions, but I don’t. Readynas is clearly confused by its status and refuses to erase it.
I am about ready to give up in this as apparently nobody knows and it’s taking too much of my time. I will just use the two drives, if possible as separate non raid volumes or maybe one huge jbod if I can figure that out. Readynas is dead technology anyway just trying to use these drives a little longer before I move on to different ssd based solutions in the future
If I had a pc I would put drive 3 in there to diagnose and erase all partitions, but I don’t
You could of course do this using ssh (or tech support mode) in the NAS. Use the smartctl tests to verify reads, and dd to overwrite with zeros (followed by looking for errors after the overwite).
Factory resets are supposed to reformat all drives - there is no failsafe to prevent data loss when you do one. AFAIK the only things that might disrupt the reformatting are a failed smart test or write errors on the drive.
Regarding the failsafe you didn’t read me right. The fail safe is not during reset, it is when trying to hot swap in a drive and do something like format It or destroy the volume associated with it. I will find the netgear article later that explains this if you want. Their solution is to factory reset, which presumably would erase it, but has been failing for me.
of course it could be something really stupid like I got disk 3 and 4 confused because it just managed to hot swap in disk 4 that I had previously removed, and was able to format it and add it to the raid, which is now raid 5 without and its resyncing with many hours to go. So the disk that is now removed, the one causing all the problems, may in fact be the one with actual disk errors and all good from here with the three drives in the unit. We shall see.after it’s up again I will try to put the excluded drive in with hot swap and show you what I see for kicks. Would be good to try the command line things you mentioned if you can help me with the specifics, just to confirm for sure the drive is actually bad. When I try to insert it that way the fail safe stuff is happening and blocking any attempts to wipe it, and it shows up as having a 16tb volime (which is the old volume that previously existed when it was part of 4 drive array). The entire icon for it in front view is red and front view says something like it I want to use it I need to remove the other drives.
when I attempted to reset it, raidar complains about “corrupt root”. The only way to know for sure is to wipe this drive from a pc and try factory reset on it.but it’s also quite likely this drive has actual failed disk errors since the disk test found errors and perhaps I got the two disks mixed up when I removed it.
In this case it is absolutely NOT erasing the disk in question. I have tried to explain why already. I will find the article from netgear that explains why it’s not, but their suggestion to do factory reset is also not working on drive 3.
This does not apply to a factory default -- everything is erased with a factory default. It does apply that an added drive isn't automatically re-formatted if not already "blank" (void of any partitions). In that case, you have to select the drive and FORMAT it and/or DESTROY any volumes on that drive. It also applies to a normal power-on with used drives, which would mean it didn't successfully complete the factory default. But I don't know why it wouldn't unless you failed to completely follow the procedure.
It sounds like you are not hot inserting the third drive. If you install it with power off and boot, it may think the volume on that drive is the one you want to keep (even though it's incomplete) and expect you to remove the volume from the other two, as you are experiencing.
If the third drive is bad, maybe it can behave as you are seeing -- I just don't know.
Lastly, there are some partitions the NAS can't remove. A system protection partition on a GPT-formatted Windows drive is one such case. But I don't know how you could have gotten one of those unless there are steps taken with the drive in a system other than the NAS that you've not listed.
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