Forum Discussion

Aspirant

Mar 31, 2022

Solved

ReadyNAS 428: Error in recognizing 5 out of 8 HDDs with RAID6

I was building RAID6 with 8 * 10TB HDDs, but when I checked it, only 3 were recognized as shown in the attached figure, and the other disks were not recognized.

dmesg log
sd 4:0:0:0: [sda] 19532873728 512-byte logical blocks: (10.0 TB/9.10 TiB)
sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] 19532873728 512-byte logical blocks: (10.0 TB/9.10 TiB)
sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] 19532873728 512-byte logical blocks: (10.0 TB/9.10 TiB)

It is unlikely that 5 HDDs will be damaged at one time, so I think problem is occur on the chassis side. Os there any case of recovery from such a situation ?
Would you please teach me ideas of how to recover ?

A simple reboot didn't change the situation.

Sandshark
Apr 01, 2022
It sounds like it is probably a hardware issue, but here is the best way to test it:

Remove all the drives, labeling them according to the slot they came from (so they can be returned their later).
Install a spare drive (of any size, but not containing any data you care about) into bay one and create a volume.
Power down and move the drive to one of the "dead" bays.
Power up and see if the volume is recognized.
Repeat for all "dead" bays.

If the drive and its volume are not recognized in the "dead" bays by itself, it is definitely a hardware issue.

If you cannot get a warranty replacement, then finding an 8-bay replacement is going to be tough. Other options are rack-mount 12-bay models. If your volume is RAID6, which it would be using default XRAID, you can also use a 6-bay unit. You'll lose redundancy, but that would likely be fine for data recovery. Booting in read-only mode would help keep anything bad from happening while you have no redundancy.

Note that legacy NAS converted to OS6 will usually work for this, but the rack-mount 3200 and 4200V1 are excluded for you since only 4 of the 12 slots will support drives >2TB. Of the legacy rack-mount units, only the RN4200V2 or a ReadyData RD5200 converted to OS6 (which is much more complicated than updating legacy ReadyNAS) will work.

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StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Mar 31, 2022
ishi wrote:

Would you please teach me ideas of how to recover ?

Do you have data to recover? Or is the issue just that the initial install failed to build the RAID array?

ishi wrote:

It is unlikely that 5 HDDs will be damaged at one time, so I think problem is occur on the chassis side.

Could well be. If you are the original purchaser, the NAS should still be covered by Netgear's 5-year warranty. You could go into my.netgear.com and request a warranty replacement.

However, I would first test the 5 disks with vendor tools (WD's Dashboard or Seagate's Seatools). If this were all shipped together, then they might have been damaged in shipment.
- ishi
  Aspirant
  Apr 01, 2022
  Hi StephenB ,
  
  Thank you for reply.
  Yes, we have data to recover (almost 50TB).
  Unfortunately, this ReadyNAS is old and maker 3-year warranty is already expired.
  So Japan NETGEAR support introduce me this community.
  Thank you for advice. As you mentioned, we can distinguish disk error with readynas box problem using Western Digital Dashboard.
  Do you mean it seems difficult to recover data in this situation ?
  
  Thanks again,
  ishi
  - StephenB
    Guru - Experienced User
    Apr 01, 2022
    ishi wrote:
    
    Unfortunately, this ReadyNAS is old and maker 3-year warranty is already expired.
    
    The warranty for the RN428 should be 5 years. The product was launched in May 2017. So I am suprised that they aren't replacing it. Are you the original purchaser (and if so, did you purchase from an authorized reseller)? Perhaps Marc_V or JeraldM can follow up on the warranty aspect.
    
    ishi wrote:
    
    Do you mean it seems difficult to recover data in this situation ?
    
    It generally is difficult to recover data. I don't think we know how difficult - it depends on what caused the problem.
    
    If you had data on the volume, then I agree it seems unlikely that 5 disks would suddenly become undetectable.
    
    If you can't find a replacement chassis (RN428, RN528, RN628, or perhaps an RR3312 rackmount), then you'll need a way to connect the disks to a Windows or Linux PC. An 8-bay USB chassis is one way you can do that.
    
    From there you can attempt to mount the RAID array. mdadm and btrfs are needed - they are normally linux tools, but there are open-source beta-level software packages for Windows available on github. Another option for extracting data is to use RAID recovery software that supports BTRFS. ReclaiMe is one package that several folks here have used with success.