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batook's avatar
batook
Aspirant
Mar 28, 2020
Solved

Factory Reset Not Working To Setup New Drive

My end goal is to get 2 Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB WD20EARS drives running in this ReadyNAS Pro 2 as separate independent volumes (JBOD). I've read on here that could be possible by first doing...
  • batook's avatar
    batook
    Apr 01, 2020

    Success! I was able to extract the firmware, mount the flash memory, and overwrite the files to perform a manual firmware update.  I made sure to check the md5sums of all the files before I rebooted to make sure everything was ok.  

     

    Extracting the firmware proved a little challenging, because it's all wrapped in a nondescript package.  I found an article here which explained how to use binwalk to get the position of the files, and then using dd to extract a tarball using that position information.  Since I don't have a linux box running right now and couldn't run binwalk on the NAS busybox, I just downloaded the 4.2.30 firmware version the author of the article used and copied the same dd command to extract the tarball for that specific firmware version. 

     

    Rebooting allowed RAIDar to detect the 4.2.30 firmware (it was never able to display 4.2.26 previously because of the file corruption), and the factory default with a single drive connected completed successfully for the first time ever.  I was then able to access the Frontview web GUI and upgrade from there to the latest 4.2.31. 

Marc_V's avatar
Marc_V
NETGEAR Employee Retired
Mar 29, 2020

batook

 

Welcome to the Community!

 

Have you tried using an older version of RAIDar? The latest version is not applying the settings you set when initializing the NAS.

 

Here is a link for an older version of NAS. Kindly try using ver 4.3.8

 

HTH

 

Regards

 

 

StephenB's avatar
StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Mar 29, 2020

As Marc_V says, you need to use RAIDar 4.3.8 to get into flexraid mode with your legacy NAS.

 

Also, I suggest starting with a single drive, and then add the second after NAS setup.  I've found that sometimes the older NAS will somehow end up in RAID-1 or a single RAID-0 volume when switch to flexraid with both disks in place.  Doing the reset with only one disk ensures that can't happen.

 

Your disks are quite old, so you might consider replacing them with newer WD Reds or Seagate Ironwolf drives that are intended for NAS use.

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