I am having problems setting up a never used Readynas 1500 unit. I can see it RAIDar it tells me to press the setup button and after slecting RAID type, it starts setting up but it always ends up with 'Corrupt Root' message. I've tried factory reset, OS reinstall options and nothing helped. There was even a 510 minute format of the drive and now the drives cannot even be formatted or zeroed out outside of the NAS. I got a new pair of drives but that did not fix the corrupt root issue. I am currently running a memory test and it's been cycling the LEDs for over an hour. Any suggestions on what to try next?

Success! It took 7 different USB drives to find one that will work but the USB firmware update did the trick and I was now able to properly set up the unit.Thanks so much for the help! To anyone struggling with this in the future:- The front USB port is the one to use. Don't get discouraged that the USB LED does not lit up.- Even though the USB recovery page says 'Before powering on the device, press and hold the Backup (or Reset on Rackmount) button', on my rackmount it was the 'backup' button that did the trick.- If the Recovery tools fails to launch on Windows with the side-by-side error, you will need the VC redist for Visual Studio 2005 (there are two, get the latest). Install the x86 version!- It might just be a coincidence but after creating the recovery drive, I noticed only the release notes got copied. I am guessing the firmware got re-encoded to a different format but since it was missing in its original downloaded form but the .html was there, I copied the firmware file manually once the usb recovery drive creation was completed.

JaSn6 wrote: The new drives were inserted straight out of the box into the NAS, so it would be rather unusual that these have an issue as well. It is unusual, but it does happen. FWIW, I purchased two drives myself last month, and one failed out-of-the-box.

JaSn6 wrote: I've tried factory reset, OS reinstall options and nothing helped. There was even a 510 minute format of the drive and now the drives cannot even be formatted or zeroed out outside of the NAS. What disks are you using? Are you saying that the disks are locked?

Initially I had a pair of 4TB Hitachi drives bought back in 2012. Before I started with the NAS I was able to connect them to a Windows machine, and create and destroy partitions. After the 510 minute format, erasing the drive fails in Windows and OSX on multiple machines. On OSX it fails with 'unable to write to last block of device' and on Windows the drive started showing up as 1.8Tb. I thought the drives were bad, so I bought a pair of new Seagate Ironwolf drives, went through the whole process again (minus the 510 minute format) and I still can't get the NAS to work. The memory test has been running for over 5h and it was still cycling LED, ending on the blue one on the right. Is this a firmware issue? I was not unable to restore it via USB and I'm wondering if I should try TFTP at this point.

JaSn6 wrote: Initially I had a pair of 4TB Hitachi drives bought back in 2012. Before I started with the NAS I was able to connect them to a Windows machine, and create and destroy partitions. After the 510 minute format, erasing the drive fails in Windows and OSX on multiple machines. On OSX it fails with 'unable to write to last block of device' and on Windows the drive started showing up as 1.8Tb. My guess is that these disks have simply failed. You could put them back into the Windows PC, and test them with WD's Lifeguard program (HGST having been purchased by WD back in 2012). In general, there's no need to format the drives in a PC first, as the NAS will just need to reformat them anyway. But it is a good idea to test them before using them in a NAS (even when the drives are newly purchased). If you want to test the Ironwolf drives, you should use Seagate's Seatools utility (which has similar functionality to Lifeguard). Personally I run both the long non-destructive test, and the full erase (write zeros) test on my drives before I use them. I have found some drives that pass one test and fail the other. JaSn6 wrote: The memory test has been running for over 5h and it was still cycling LED, ending on the blue one on the right. Is this a firmware issue? I was not unable to restore it via USB and I'm wondering if I should try TFTP at this point. Corrupt root is usually something with the disks. The NAS boots from the disks, and it is telling you that it can't do that with yours. If you did format the Ironwolf drives (maybe with a quick format), then I'd go back to Windows and remove the partitions with the windows disk manager. Then try inserting just one disk in the NAS, and power it up again. Normally it will do a fresh factory install. Trying with one disk eliminates the need for the NAS to build the RAID array, so it is a quicker test. One thing to keep in mind - with the old NAS, there is a ~10 minute window after you start the factory install before the install actually starts. That is to give you time to go in with RAIDar and switch to FlexRAID if you want. That gap can mislead you into thinking the NAS isn't working.

Readynas 1500 corrupt root | NETGEAR Communities

22 Replies

StephenB
Guru
Dec 09, 2020
JaSn6 wrote:

I've tried factory reset, OS reinstall options and nothing helped. There was even a 510 minute format of the drive and now the drives cannot even be formatted or zeroed out outside of the NAS.

What disks are you using?

Are you saying that the disks are locked?
- JaSn6
  Guide
  Dec 10, 2020
  Initially I had a pair of 4TB Hitachi drives bought back in 2012. Before I started with the NAS I was able to connect them to a Windows machine, and create and destroy partitions. After the 510 minute format, erasing the drive fails in Windows and OSX on multiple machines. On OSX it fails with 'unable to write to last block of device' and on Windows the drive started showing up as 1.8Tb.
  
  I thought the drives were bad, so I bought a pair of new Seagate Ironwolf drives, went through the whole process again (minus the 510 minute format) and I still can't get the NAS to work.
  
  The memory test has been running for over 5h and it was still cycling LED, ending on the blue one on the right.
  
  Is this a firmware issue? I was not unable to restore it via USB and I'm wondering if I should try TFTP at this point.
  - StephenB
    Guru
    Dec 10, 2020
    JaSn6 wrote:
    
    Initially I had a pair of 4TB Hitachi drives bought back in 2012. Before I started with the NAS I was able to connect them to a Windows machine, and create and destroy partitions. After the 510 minute format, erasing the drive fails in Windows and OSX on multiple machines. On OSX it fails with 'unable to write to last block of device' and on Windows the drive started showing up as 1.8Tb.
    
    My guess is that these disks have simply failed. You could put them back into the Windows PC, and test them with WD's Lifeguard program (HGST having been purchased by WD back in 2012).
    
    In general, there's no need to format the drives in a PC first, as the NAS will just need to reformat them anyway. But it is a good idea to test them before using them in a NAS (even when the drives are newly purchased). If you want to test the Ironwolf drives, you should use Seagate's Seatools utility (which has similar functionality to Lifeguard). Personally I run both the long non-destructive test, and the full erase (write zeros) test on my drives before I use them. I have found some drives that pass one test and fail the other.
    
    JaSn6 wrote:
    
    The memory test has been running for over 5h and it was still cycling LED, ending on the blue one on the right.
    
    Is this a firmware issue? I was not unable to restore it via USB and I'm wondering if I should try TFTP at this point.
    
    Corrupt root is usually something with the disks. The NAS boots from the disks, and it is telling you that it can't do that with yours. If you did format the Ironwolf drives (maybe with a quick format), then I'd go back to Windows and remove the partitions with the windows disk manager. Then try inserting just one disk in the NAS, and power it up again. Normally it will do a fresh factory install. Trying with one disk eliminates the need for the NAS to build the RAID array, so it is a quicker test.
    
    One thing to keep in mind - with the old NAS, there is a ~10 minute window after you start the factory install before the install actually starts. That is to give you time to go in with RAIDar and switch to FlexRAID if you want. That gap can mislead you into thinking the NAS isn't working.

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Readynas 1500 corrupt root

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