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Forum Discussion
ReadyNAS RN516 stuck on boot
I am a novice when it comes to this, but hopefully someone can help. My current NAS is an RN516 with four WD RED 3tb NAS drives. I powered down the unit today to move it to another location, and af...
I just tried unseating the memory and put everything back together. Now it doesn't appear to be getting any power as it won't power up. Think it may be time for an RMA
So after opening the box to check the memory and reseat the battery, I was told I voided my warranty. After several months of back and forth with Netgear, they will not accept an RMA. The unit is still stuck in a boot loop. I have tried using the reset button, but cannot get to the boot menu. I have tried using a USB Recovery tool and the drive light comes on to show that it is being accessed, but it will not do anything but flash the initial welcome message on the display and the purple "OK" on the front. I'm looking for any other ideas to salvage this unit!
Well you mentioned in the opening post of this thread that you opened the unit to try reseating the CMOS battery.
It's unfortunate that you inadvertently voided your warranty.It doesn't look like your unit is booting far enough for troubleshooting to be done at the community level.
There could be a hardware problem of some kind but one could only guess as to what it might be.
Is your backup up to date?
I have a new unit in place and have moved my drives over. It is up and running well. I'd like to get this unit back up and running if possible as it was an expensive piece of hardware. I am open to trying just about anything right now as I don't have to worry about voiding my warranty.
rmnottingham wrote:
So after opening the box to check the memory and reseat the battery, I was told I voided my warranty.
Your first post made it clear that you'd already opened up the box before you posted anything. I'd have given different advice on the memory seating if you hadn't done that.
FWIW, while I get that some people might do damage when they open the NAS up, IMO Netgear's policy on this is rather draconian.
rmnottingham wrote:
I have tried using a USB Recovery tool and the drive light comes on to show that it is being accessed, but it will not do anything but flash the initial welcome message on the display and the purple "OK" on the front.
First try taking a scratch SATA disk, and zero it with vendor tools in a Windows PC (seatools for seagate, lifeguard for western digital). Then remove the existing disks (labeling by slot) and insert the scratch (test) disk. Power up the NAS, and see if it does a fresh factory install.
If that works, the boot issue is disk-related (either a disk failure, or a corrupted operating system on the disks). If that's your situation, you'd need to do some form of data recovery to extract the data on the NAS, and you'd then be able to do a factory reset to rebuild the NAS and start over.
But if it fails, it is either a chassis failure or an issue with the flash memory. In that case, the first thing to try is another USB recovery attempt with a different flash drive. It might possibly be a PSU failure (since the LCD panel will work if there is only 5 volts).
I have a brand new WD 3TB drive that I was planning on using in the unit if I got it running again. Will putting it into the unit suffice or do I need to format it first?
rmnottingham wrote:
I have a brand new WD 3TB drive that I was planning on using in the unit if I got it running again. Will putting it into the unit suffice or do I need to format it first?
Don't format it, as that would force you to use the boot menu to do the factory reset.
With a blank disk, the system will automatically do a factory install.
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