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NV+ RND4210: network and boot failure
I suspect my NV+ may have failed and need replacing, but before I give up on it please could anyone advise me based on the symptoms outlined below. A few years ago I replaced the two failing orig...
Does RAIDar find it if you have no drives installed? if not, there is something wrong with the chassis. if it does, it's something to do with your volume. Check the drive health and be prepared that a factory default may ne required.
If it's the NAS chassis, it strill could be the power supply, even though the fan and LEDs are one. There is a voltage called +5BSB (+5 volts standby) that powers the on/off circuit and the network interface. The power supply is almost a standard mini ITX supply, but the pin-out is slightly modified and there is no fan. With an adapter, a standard ATX supply can be used externally to see if it's just a power issue.
If you have a backup of the data, you need to decide if spending money on the old, slow NAS is worthwhile or if there is a new NAS in your future.
camellia wrote:
is there a current compatible, robust, bare NAS available you can recommend where I could just pop in the two drives with the data intact and carry on?
No. Note that the NAS also runs linux from the disks. The OS is for the sparc platform, and that hasn't been used by Netgear since 2011.
So you will need to offload data.
You can connect disk 1 of the NAS to a Windows PC (either with SATA or a USB adapter dock). R-linux for Windows is a free utility that should be able to find your files so you can offload them. https://www.r-studio.com/free-linux-recovery/
camellia wrote:The local computer shop guy warned me that even with a mirrored RAID array, one drive is always master and the other(s) slaves, and he says one can't necessarily read a single drive in a one-drive caddy. If so, that would seem to negate the whole idea of RAID.
A mirror is supposed to be exactly that (and in newer ReadyNAS it is). However in the specific case of the old sparc-based platforms, the C volume mirror (or parity disk) isn't partitioned. So the data is there, but can't be easily accessed. I don't know why they did that - it might have been a constraint in the RAID acceleration hardware that the sparc systems use. In any event, that decision was made by Infrant (before Netgear bought then).
Anyway, that is why I specified "disk 1" above. And if R-linux doesn't see the C volume, I suggest trying again with disk 2 - there are some scenarios where the mirror ends up in slot 1.
Thank you StephenB. We have a very helpful chap who runs a computer shop in my small town. Hopefully he will have the hardware available to get the data off my disks, with the help of the replies from you and Sandshark. Maybe he can rig up a temporary power supply as per other threads on this forum. I migrated to a Mac Pro notebook a few years ago and got rid of all my old Windows-based hardware. Shame, I once had old Dell desktops with room for two 3.5" HDDs, ATX power supply etc, and have been known to help my son assemble PCs. But these days I'm into "simplicity", which you might well call "complacency".
I must say I feel pretty cheated by the sudden failure of the NV+. I thought having my own device with a redundant array of disks would be a safe option compared to, say, cloud backup. I even had a secondary backup from the NV+ to a WD My Passport USB drive plugged into the NV+. Now I can no longer read this either when plugged into my Mac, presumably because of the proprietary format.
Anyway, I appreciate your explanation and Sandshark's. I'll keep you posted with the outcome in case it helps others in the same boat.
Kind regards
The USB drive should not be in a proprietary format. You would have chosen the format when you started using it. Since it's not mounting automatically for you, I suspect it's EXT format, for which you can get a Mac driver.
Sandshark wrote:
The USB drive should not be in a proprietary format. You would have chosen the format when you started using it. Since it's not mounting automatically for you, I suspect it's EXT format, for which you can get a Mac driver.
Of course it's also possible that the USB drive has failed over the years.
But I agree that it is likely just formatted as EXT (which is a common linux format, not proprietary). One source for an EXT driver is here: https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/extfs-mac/
Netgear doesn't use proprietary disk formats generally - the only one I am aware of is the parity disk on the your old v1 NAS. Even that is arguably not proprietary (and in any event, that design predates Netgear).
Thank you guys, you were quite correct of course. I was fast and loose using the word "proprietary". I installed a 10-day trial of extFS for Mac. Now I can see a volume called something like extFS, with loads of subfolders. I also have the option to eject this volume, and when I do I can see another volume on the device that is directly readable, a backup of my old Windows-based PC I created ages ago. Probably wasn't a great idea to have a single USB drive with different file systems. Anyway, that the least of my problems right now. Priority is to #1 make a new image of my complete machine, #2 get the data off those RAID HDDs and #3 decide on a new strategy for Mac backup: a new NAS, cloud storage or perhaps both. And #4 whether to use Mac's Time Machine or something more user-controllable. Please feel free to advise. Thanks again.
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