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Netgear ReadyNas Pro 6 corrupt firmware
First Netgear NAS user. I bought a defect Netgear ReadyNAS Pro 6. The previous owner said something went wrong during a firmware update and the NAS had some sort of corrupt firmware. It was 40Euro an...
This post How-to-update-BIOS-w-OS6-x-installed tells how to update the BIOS from OS6. While that part isn't applicable to you, it includes information on extracting the BIOS from the OS4.2.x package Netgear has provided and points to that package.
I have converted all of my legacy systems to OS6. It's not officially supported, but it works and instructions for doing so are here in the forum. But I've been a ReadyNAS user since the Infrant days, so am quite accustomed to the ReadyNAS look and feel (even with the changes on OS6). And I like it that somebody other than me is doing the work of keeping the OS up to date. With OS4.2.x being based on such an old Debian distro, I certainly recommend against just getting started with that. OS6 or an open source solution would be better.
Again thanks, Sandshark. I decided to give a try to OS6 and take a final decision in a few weeks before I'llk have to much data in there. I got a few more questions: The Pro 6 boots and after it loads the kernel and inird.gz it says "Ready" and the VGA screen goes immediatelly dark.
On the embedded OLED Screen messages continue to change "Initializing Network interfaces" etc. and ends up with "No disks found Installed" or something similar. I tried in the boot menu both "Normal" boot and "Factory Default" boot. Did not try yet the "OS Install" boot.
In the NAS there are currently 2 drives installed, one 1TB WD Black which came with the ReadyNas and another 1TB Samsung HDD which I used to have in my Synology DS211j. Both are in fact "foreign" drives, when I boot the Readynas in Linux Mint I see in Gparted the 128MB Flash and the 2 x 1TB drives. The WD Black have a MicroSoft NTFS partition on it so I do not think it was actually used in this ReadyNAS.
I did not find last night an easy way to figure if the 128MB USB contains OS4 or OS6.
No matter what I did I could not see the NAS in RAIDAR, tried both version 6.3 and 4.2.8 on a Windows 10 machine with local firewall disabled. Both Network ports when I connect them to my Gigabit switch blink when there is (broadcast) traffic but do not query for a DHCP address or similar. When booting Factory Default mode I tried multiple times since I understood the NAS should be visible in Raidar for about 10minutes after it boots and finishes a disk check which should take about 5min.
And now the questions:
1. Does it matter if I connect Lan1 or Lan2 when looking for NAS via Raidar ?
2. Does it matter the Raidar version ? For example if I run Raidar 6.3 will it find a OS4.2 NAS or the other way around ?
3. Are both Raidar 4.2 and 6.3 compatible with Windows 10 64 bit ?
4. Should I try OS Reinstall Boot mode to write the OS to the WD Black drive ?
Or should I already create the USB disk for recovery to 4.2.8 and try that ?
5. During troubleshooting I removed temporaritly the Bios battery. As I read during Bios upgrade to Flame 2.0 the only non-default setting seem to be setting the Fan speed from Manual to Thermal/55 degree. Are there any other settings I might need to review in the board BIOS ? For instance I saw Intel SpeedStep is disabled. In principle is good to have SpeedStep enabled, especially for a NAS which will be lightly used but if not supported by ACPI/OS it will not work properly. Are anywhere listed the recomended Bios settings ?
Sorry for all those questions, I still try to wrap my head around on how it works and what does what.
FlaviaS wrote:
1. Does it matter if I connect Lan1 or Lan2 when looking for NAS via Raidar ?
It shouldn't, but since the NAS isn't booting it's a good idea to try both.
FlaviaS wrote:
2. Does it matter the Raidar version ? For example if I run Raidar 6.3 will it find a OS4.2 NAS or the other way around ?
Both will find the NAS and report status. RAIDar 4.3.8 is needed if you want to set up the NAS in flexraid mode with OS 4.2 firmware. But that's down the road (if ever).
FlaviaS wrote:
3. Are both Raidar 4.2 and 6.3 compatible with Windows 10 64 bit ?
Yes.
FlaviaS wrote:
Again thanks, Sandshark. I decided to give a try to OS6 and take a final decision in a few weeks before I'llk have to much data in there.
Are you using the guide for this? There is a prep image that needs to be installed - you don't just do a USB recovery with OS6. The normal process is to get OS 4.2 up first, and then migrate to OS 6.
Hi Stephen,
"Are you using the guide for this? There is a prep image that needs to be installed - you don't just do a USB recovery with OS6. The normal process is to get OS 4.2 up first, and then migrate to OS 6."
Yes I am aware of that guide and all the steps involved (including one reboot in Factory Default boot mode).
My problem is that I do not know yet what OS is installed on the 128MB flash.
If that flash already contains a working OS6 image I guess I only need to boot in OS recovery mode to have the code copied from flash to drives ?
If the image is OS4 I would try to recover using the USB stick recovery image and only after go through the steps to upgrade to OS6. In the documentation about that USB recovery is explicitelly mentioned it cannot be used to downgrade so I assume if the internal 128MB USB already contains OS6 it would not work. In that last situation I saw a post in which someone booted a linux distribution, used dd to copy a valid 4.x image to the internal USB and them mounted it to edit his own information (serial number, mac adresses maybe).
As I said the fact that I'm new to this NAS makes very dificult to me but I'm willing to learn. I just do not understand why an image which seems to boot succesfully is not recognized in raidar, even without any drive inserted.
FlaviaS wrote:
The normal process is to get OS 4.2 up first, and then migrate to OS 6."
Yes I am aware of that guide and all the steps involved (including one reboot in Factory Default boot mode).
Good.
You're moving into territory I haven't explored, so I can't offer any help on the NAS hardware issues.
Just in case you haven't seen this: https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/csc/people/computingstaff/jaroslaw_zachwieja/readynaspro-jailfix/
The older version of RAIDar will give you a bit more information than the newer one if you are running an OS earlier than 6. It also has a (much better, IMHO) more compact arrangement. But both will see your NAS with either OS version.
When the VGA says "ready" and goes blank, that's where it usually begins booting from the OS on the drives. I've never watched when it first installs the OS to the drives, but that's what the OLED message makes me think it wants to do. If your drives do not contain any ReadyNAS OS, you should not need to do a factory default -- it should do one for you on OS4.2.x. In OS6.x, it would complain of "dirty disks" and let you go in and format them. But if you remove all partitions from the drives, then both should automatically do a factory default. Have you tried all slots? Maybe some are dead.
But RAIDar should see the NAS at that point if "no disks" is really the problem. It, too, will report a "no disks" status. You should certainly try both ethernet ports in case one is bad. Do you see any activity on the LAN LED's?
Going blank and then nothing is something I saw when I was experimenting with a ReadyNAS4200V2. I wanted to see what would happen if I replaced the motherboard with a non-Netgear version (that board is made by SuperMicro, and thay also sell the board without the Netgear mod)s. I believe this behavior was caused by the OS finding something other than a Netgear BIOS. I know it was not a bad flash because the flash in the 4200 is an internal USB stick I moved to the replacement board. So something still missing in the BIOS could be your issue, though "No Disks" is not an error message I would expect to see for that.
Could the OS in the flash be corruted in such a way that it boots everything fine except the rdrivers that let it see the drives? Seems unlikely, but I suppose another remote possibility.
I guess the previous owner must have manually flashed the wrong BIOS. The add-on does check to make sure it uses the right image for the right board, but it doesn't check to see if the latest BIOS is already installed or not.
You can use USB Boot Recovery to put OS6 on the Pro 6 if you rename the standard OS6 x86_64 .img file to RAIDiator-x86-something. You do need to use the RAIDiator-x86 USB Boot Recovery tool. However USB Boot Recovery can wipe the EEPROM so this is not recommended unless USB Boot Recovery is really needed, which it may well be considering you don't know what the previous owner did.
There is an image to downgrade back to RAIDiator-x86 from OS6 that tricks OS6 into thinking that a RAIDiator-x86 image is an OS6 image (the reverse of what the image to put OS6 on does).This seems to have been the case almost for sure. The NAS is now working properly. I noticed that if I boot it without any drive inserted it does appear in RaidAR (and reporting Firmware 6.80). At the time when this happened, last Friday, the latest version on Netgear website was 6.81. As soon as I was inserting either one of the 2 drives I had available the NAS was dissapearing from Raidar. I then removed all existing partitions from one of the drives and when I booted it with that drive inserted in in slot 1 (this is by the way a drive which is listed in Pro 6 compatibility list). I gave a message "Installing X-Raid firmware on the drive" and then I could connect and configure the NAS normally. It seems it quickly and automatically downloaded version 6.90 of firmware from the Internet since this is what it reports now. I like the interface which is clear and minimalistic and very responsive. First thing I did was to disable x-raid since I want Flex-raid instead. I also ordered a E7600 CPU and 2x2GB DDR2 6400 for Intel from Ebay (7 Euro + 10.50Euro). Most likely will use it with OS6 and not convert it to nas4free since upgrade to 8GB RAM is prohibitivelly expensive and Nas4Free with ZFS is recommended to have 8GB RAM minimum.
Thanks everyone for helping me out with this project.
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