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Forum Discussion
Firmware Update Wipes Out Volume
Monday, I needed to power off my ReadyNAS as I was swapping out the batteries on my UPS. When I brought it back up, I saw the alert for the 6.10.3 firmware update, so I figured since it was after hou...
I finally got through to another guy who has been working on it. 3 days and the on hold time seems excessive but I am glad to have finally made some progress.
Currently waiting to hear back from him. We have looked at the logs and from the logs, everything was fine until the firmware update and then apparently it did not see drive 3 and 4. Slot 3 does this a lot and I am on the 4th drive in slot 3. I am pretty sure the drives are fine, just something with backplane that they slide into decides there is no drive present... so according to the tech, when it booted up after the firmware without seeing 3 and 4, it degraded the RAID and deleted the volume. Looks like data recovery is the next step, just hope he gets back to me soon.
phrosty23 wrote:Currently waiting to hear back from him. We have looked at the logs and from the logs, everything was fine until the firmware update and then apparently it did not see drive 3 and 4. Slot 3 does this a lot and I am on the 4th drive in slot 3. I am pretty sure the drives are fine, just something with backplane that they slide into decides there is no drive present... so according to the tech, when it booted up after the firmware without seeing 3 and 4, it degraded the RAID and deleted the volume. Looks like data recovery is the next step, just hope he gets back to me soon.
While I don't like to disparage a Netgear employee when I may not have all the facts, that's just not what normally happens nor what appears to have happened on your NAS from the screen grab you posted. The NAS does not delete the volume because it's bad, it fails to mount it. You have both an unmounted (corrupt or incomplete) BTRFS volume (Netshare) and an MDADM RAID 5 array (Netshare-1) present. Data recovery may still be necessary if the BTRFS volume got corrupted in a failed attempt to mount it (if Drive 4 was still partly functionsl, that could easily happen), but that's not the first step that should be tried. But what needs to be tried can't be done remotely by the tech.
You need to test all the drives and the chassis. If you can find a combination of three good drives and three good slots, then putting those together may give you a usable (though degraded) volume from which you can copy the data prior to replacing your NAS (assuming the bad slot isn't just contamination in the connector or a caddy not fully seating), just move those drives to your new NAS, or (best option) both.
The best way to test the drives is with the vendor's tool (WD Lifeguard or Seatools) and a USB to SATA dock.
The best way to test the chassis is to use a spare drive (containing no data you care about) and create a new volume in slot 1, then power down and move to each slot and see if it boots.
My guess is that slot 3 is bad (as you've already figured out) and drive 4 has a problem. So drives 1, 2, and 3 in slots 1, 2, and 4 may get you going. Just trying that is not a good idea, as it could make recovery more difficult if thats not the (whole) story.
I ended up paying $200 for data recovery and teir 3 support retrieved everything successfully. I am currently waiting for support to remote back in and finish up diagnostics.
So I have made progress... took 3 days but I finally got through to the right people.
phrosty23 wrote:
I ended up paying $200 for data recovery and tier 3 support retrieved everything successfully.
That is good news.
Now that the data is back, I suggest putting a backup plan in place. As you found out, RAID isn't enough to keep it safe. USB drives are a cost-effective option (and you can set up backup jobs on the NAS that back it up on a schedule).
Turns out I did not need data recovery. I have a hardware issue with slot 3.
I could easily recreate the data / volume loss by putting a drive in slot 3 and rebooting. Upon booting, drives 3 and 4 behave like they need to be resynced... so with 2 drives down I am beyond the 1 spare drive tolerance of RAID5. So the volume is gone... but remove the drive from slot 3 and *presto* the volume is back but in a degraded state.
I tried 7 different drives in slot 3 and encountered the same scenario. I used 2 WD Enterprise drives, one WD Red drive, and 4 destkop drives. The NAS would not recognize any drive via hot swap but the moment you reboot and come back up, 3 and 4 do their weirdness, volume is offline and I am back to the "data loss". Pop the drive out, reboot and back to degraded volume. So there really was no need for data recovery had I figured out ahead of time that pulling drive 3 out would have 'fixed' my volume.
Eventually support came to the same conclusion that I have a hardware problem and I am in the process of an RMA.
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