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Forum Discussion
ReadyNAS 104: Sudden BTRFS IO Failure - do I need a new NAS, or is this potentially fixable?
Hi. I have a ReadyNas 104 that stopped working all of a sudden. Backup state: My latest backup (to an external HD) is maybe a year old. I'll lose nothing critical if I can't get it working agai...
The OS that is running reides on the drives, not on the flash. This is clearly not a problem with the flash, but with your actual volume. The flash contains an absolutey clean copy of the OS, just to install on a new set of doives, and a boot-loader ro load into the various boot menu modes. When a normal boot is performed, it passes contro to the OS on the drives, and that's when your volume gets mounted.
It is a shame you didn't head the warning the NAS was giving. It is nearly impossible to recover from an error that causes a volume to go read-only. Even when I had one caused by a loose cable to an EDA500, so the root cause to be created, the damage to the volume was irreparable. The correctiove action is to make the recommended backup, do a factory default (or, a volume destroy and-re-create if you have multiple volumes) and restore that data.
By continuing to re-boot, you gave multiple drives the oppoprtunity to go out of sync, killing the volume. Now, the question is "What drove that?"
With SMART saying the drives are OK, it could be a hardware problem within the NAS.
If there is any reason you want to try and recover data, take note of how many volumes are displayed on the Volumes page, and their names. You'll probably see more than one in the form data-0, data-1, etc. The, go the Performace and hover the mouse over the "dot" for each drive and note which volume it says it's a part of. This can give us a start, though the full logs mey be necessary.
The SMART data from the log is likely accurate, but testing the drives with with vendor tools is a good troubleshooting step. I like looking at SMART with Crystal Dsikinfo, too, because the vendor tools just give a pass/fail.
You can also test the chassis with a spare drive (whose contents will be deleted) by removing your normal drives and instering just the spare. Let the NAS initialize it, and create a single-drive volume. Then, power down, move the drive to the next bay, and power up. Repeat till all are tested. if it fails to boot in one of more slots, but boots in some, it's definately a hardware problem.
If you are OK with the backup you have, you could just do a factory default and see what happens. If one drive fails to sync, test it with vendor tools.. If it really is OK, swap the drives around and try again. If the same slot(s) have an issue with another drive, it's a hardware problem you aren't going to solve.
First of all, thank you to both of you for taking the time to respond. I very much appriciate it!
It's been very busy week, so I haven't gotten around to looking more at this until last night.
The current status is:
I connected 3 drives to my desktop, and found that ReclaimMe (which I saw recommended in another thread describing a similar problem) could read the file system. Decided that paying for recovery software was a more attractive alternative than paying for recovery service for several reasons (lifetime license, I have other disks I might want to recover, learning experience, etc) so I bought it and I'm currently copying my content (seemingly without issues) to an external USB disk.
So I *think* the backup side of things will be fine.
As for the NAS and disks; I checked the SMART data in the performance tab as Sandshark suggested, and it too reported no errors on any of the disks. So my current plan is that when I'm done with the data recovery part (Which I fear will take at least 1-2 weeks) I'm probably going to go with the suggestion to pick a drive and try to boot the NAS with the drive once in each slot, and see if I can narrow the problem down a bit.
I'll be back with updates and/or questions, depending on how this works out. Again, I very much appriciate the responses and input so far. :)
A quick update:
I've recovered, as far as I can tell, pretty much all the files, but I've lost some of the directory structure, meaning that effectively they're a jumbled mess. So at some point in the near future, I have a sorting/cleanup job I'm not looking forward to.
On the hardware side, I used a drive and initialized it successfully in all the four slots in the NAS, as suggested. No issues. All drives still report no Smart errors. So I've put them all back in, and the nas is now syncing (very, very slowly). I've also invested in more cold storage where I'm going to duplicate everything once I'm done sorting.
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