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Forum Discussion
leopold005
Aug 15, 2021Aspirant
ReadyNAS 2100 bricked
I'll confess to have been a bit stupid. I picked up a pair of ReadyNAS 2100s off eBay recently, one of which is running OS 6 and the other OS 4. I wanted both to run OS 6 and found instructions to ...
Sandshark
Aug 16, 2021Sensei
The only one of those that might work is a USB recovery. The rest are a waste of time, as they are just installing the (wrong) firmware from flash. For the USB recovery, are you creating one for an OS4.2.x based system (RAIDiator-4-2-USB-Recovery-Tool ) and using the proper boot procedure for your NAS (holding the reset button)?
This user Stuck-booting-ReadyNAS-NVX did find USB recovery to be the answer for the same issue on an NVX (desktop model that uses the same processor as the 2100V1). The legacy NAS can be very particular as to what USB devices work for recovery.
I have absolutely no idea what might happen if you can create a 4.2.31 volume on another NAS and mount it in the 2100. With a legacy machine, a mismatch of versions in flash and drive normally results in the flash "winning" (where with OS6, the newer wins), but I don't know what would happen in your unusual case. I certainly don't think it could make things any worse.
- leopold005Aug 17, 2021Aspirant
Okay, so I gave the suggestion of grabbing a 4.x drive from another NAS (I've got a 1500 which has escaped my idiocy, thankfully!) and that didn't work either. So I guess I'm stuck unless I can find a USB stick that actually works. I don't suppose anyone knows of one, do they?
- SandsharkAug 17, 2021Sensei
I have two older Lexor "TwistTurn2" 2GB that work great, but most people are likely to just chuck them instead of selling them, and the smallest currently for sale seems to be 16GB. I have bought some cheap 8GB ones on Amazon that also worked the one time I tried (just to see if they would). Try to stay away from anything larger than 8GB (though some have had luck with larger, many haven't) and definitely not USB3. But I don't own a 2100, and don't know if some models are more finicky than others.
- leopold005Aug 18, 2021Aspirant
Thanks for the help. I'm currently trying again in the hope that some of this information will get me to a solution!
Just for my info, at what point did you release the backup (or reset) button when doing the recovery? As this is a rackmount, the instructions tell me to use reset and if I hold it for too long it goes into the boot menu, which I don't know if I want or not - although I'm presuming not at this point. If I release before then, the fans spin down a bit and the box sits there and thus far the only USB drive which appears to do anything differently is the SanDisk Cruzer and I'm not sure if that's down to the CD emulating bit that I can't get rid of.
Also, what files were on the drive? I only get these four:
- initrd.gz
- kernel
- RAIDiator-x86-4.2.31
- syslinux.cfg
I'm a bit surprised that syslinux.exe isn't on there, should it be?
I'll keep chipping away at it for now. Not like it's going to be much use to me otherwise!
- mdgmAug 18, 2021Virtuoso
Sandshark wrote:I have absolutely no idea what might happen if you can create a 4.2.31 volume on another NAS and mount it in the 2100. With a legacy machine, a mismatch of versions in flash and drive normally results in the flash "winning" (where with OS6, the newer wins), but I don't know what would happen in your unusual case. I certainly don't think it could make things any worse.
In a firmware mismatch situation regardless of what the NAS does to attempt to resolve it, it would try booting off the internal flash and the code in the firmware to handle firmware mismatches would be used. However as the 32-bit systems can't boot 64-bit code it wouldn't even get that far with OS6 on the internal flash.
USB Boot Recovery is the only way to fix this problem.
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