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Forum Discussion
bhf1
Jan 28, 2020Aspirant
Stuck in Booting....
Original ower of a mint NV+ RND4210v3 w/ 4 1TB drives from 2009. Yeah, it's old, but it had been a workhorse, no real issues until now. When I moved last year, I shut it down, wrapped it in layers ...
- Feb 01, 2020
You should try the single drive in each slot test first to see if the problem is in the SATA backplane. If that works, then it could be a weak power supply, likely the 12V, but check them all.. It's not difficult to get to the internal power connector to measure voltages. It's a modified ATX configuration. Pin-out is here: ReadyNAS_PSU_pinout.pdf . Make your measurements under load, maybe with dioffering numbers of drives.
bhf1
Jan 29, 2020Aspirant
OK, I tried your suggestion and ran through all 16 combinations of drives and slots by powering up with only one drive in one slot at a time.. Interesting results and when I repeated some of the combinations, I got different results. So the issue is not static. Slots are on the x-axis, Disks on the y-axis
Slots Disk 1 2 3 4 1 ND ND OK Stuck 2 BFW ND Stuck BFW 3 OK OK OK Stuck 4 OK OK OK Stuck I re-ran Disk 2 through the 4 slots: 2 BFW BFW IFW Stuck And re-ran slot 3 again 2 Stuck ND = No disk Stuck = Stuck in "Booting..... Please wait" BFW = Bad FW IFW = Installing FW
I tried a Hail Mary and put Disk 1 in Slot 1 and powered up with a Factory Default and crossed my fingers. It came up, formatted the drive, and seemed to be normal. I inserted Disk 2 in slot 2 to see if it would sync and it did. Then Disk 3 in slot 3 and it started syncing. Based on the Admin page projection of sync time, it should have finished about 8 am. But the log when I got up said it finished about 3am.
Then I pushed my luck and put Disk 4 in Slot 4. The NAS seemed to be locked up. I could not do a soft shutdown so I pulled the power plug. When I powered it back up, it "Stuck" on booting. Back to square 1.
Pulled the plug again, removed Disk 4, and powered back up. Now the Disk 2 light is blinking and it says "C: 0/0MB free". RAIDar sees the NAS, says it's Healthy and that Disk 2 is resyncing. FrontView came up and I got the Status log. The last entry is:
A SATA reset has been performed on one or more of your disks that may have affected the RAID parity integrity. It is recommended that you perform a RAID volume resync from the RAID Settings tab (accessible in the Volumes page => Volume tab in FrontView) The resync proces will run in the background and you can continue to use the ReadyNAS in the meantime.
The "Resync Volume" button was grayed out and there was no resync progress indicator. Now FrontView times out.
Thoughts?
- Is this worth wasting time, or should I just use it for a boat anchor?
- The different responses between disks and slots is rather concerning. Not sure what that means. To recap, I tested all 4 disks with the manufacturer tool and they all passed SMART & Short disk test.
- Since the NAS seemed to react badly to Disk 4 in slot 4 is this a slot 4 issue?
- Or maybe a weak power supply that can't handle 4 drives?
- Should I abort whatever the NAS is currently doing
LCD shows: 192.168.168.168 C: 0/0MB free and the LCD is not switching to show the progress percentage. - Start over again after upgrading to FW 4.1.16?
Currently running RAIDiator 4.1.14.
StephenB
Jan 29, 2020Guru - Experienced User
bhf1 wrote: Start over again after upgrading to FW 4.1.16?Currently running RAIDiator 4.1.14.
No point in that, as 4.1.16 just adds a couple of security fixes.
bhf1 wrote:
I tried a Hail Mary and put Disk 1 in Slot 1 and powered up with a Factory Default and crossed my fingers. It came up, formatted the drive, and seemed to be normal. I inserted Disk 2 in slot 2 to see if it would sync and it did. Then Disk 3 in slot 3 and it started syncing. Based on the Admin page projection of sync time, it should have finished about 8 am. But the log when I got up said it finished about 3am.
Then I pushed my luck and put Disk 4 in Slot 4. The NAS seemed to be locked up. I could not do a soft shutdown so I pulled the power plug. When I powered it back up, it "Stuck" on booting. Back to square 1.
You might try testing disk 4 in a PC using vendor tools. I realize you did that already - but if you didn't try the full erase disk (or write zeros) test, you might try that. Sometimes that will uncover issues that the non-destructive tests miss.
If it is the slot, you could of course just use 3x2TB drives, and live with a 4 TB volume.
bhf1 wrote:
Thoughts?
- Is this worth wasting time, or should I just use it for a boat anchor?
It's not worth a lot of time. A newer NAS will be much faster, and will have support for SMB 3. The NV+ is limited to SMB 1, which is being deprecated by both Microsoft and Apple.
- bhf1Jan 31, 2020Aspirant
Thanks. I am running some experiments, looks like they are pointing to the NAS being able to run with 3 drives, but not 4. Questions:
1. The basic process I am using is to insert 1 drive and do a Factory Reset. Once that is done and the NAS is running on one drive, hot insert a 2nd and let the volume expand. Then a third. In between I do a reboot with FS check. Does the expansion have to be done one drive at a time, or can I insert more than one drive at a time to expand the volume?
2. When I add the 2nd drive to expand the volume, FrontView shows the % complete, Time to complete, and the data rate. The time for this 2nd drive is about 5 hours and is very accurate. When I add the third drive, FrontView shows only % complete and Time to complete. Now the time is almost 9 hours, but it actually completes in about 3 hours. Is this normal?
3. I have gotten the NAS up to 3 drives with normal operation twice. But when I hot insert the 4th drive the NAS locks up and I have to pull the power plug. I tried just removing the 4th drive and the NAS still sticks in booting. This issue is not drive or slot dependent. I suspect the power supply can't handle 4 drives. Any suggestions on where to look in the PS?
4. The NAS seems very sensative to anything that might upset it. For example, instead of hot inserting a new drive to expand the volume, I inserted with power off then powered up. The NAS stuck in "Booting.... Please wait" and I had to start over. Is this normal?
5. The booting process looks like it has diagnostic info. For example, the fan switches from high speed to low speed. The power button light flashes at different rates. Is there anything that documents the booting process so this info could provide clues as to why the booting fails sometimes?
- StephenBJan 31, 2020Guru - Experienced User
bhf1 wrote:
1. The basic process I am using is to insert 1 drive and do a Factory Reset. Once that is done and the NAS is running on one drive, hot insert a 2nd and let the volume expand. Then a third. In between I do a reboot with FS check. Does the expansion have to be done one drive at a time, or can I insert more than one drive at a time to expand the volume?
A simpler process is to power down the system, and move the disk to the next slot. If the system boots normally, then do some testing to read/write files to a share. NasTester can be used for that. http://www.808.dk/?code-csharp-nas-performance
Then power down, and and repeat until all the slots are tested.
No expansion would be needed with the simpler process, and your disk testing would be focused on the single slot you were testing.
But to answer your question, you can add more than one disk, but the expansion only does one disk at a time.
bhf1 wrote:
2. When I add the 2nd drive to expand the volume, FrontView shows the % complete, Time to complete, and the data rate. The time for this 2nd drive is about 5 hours and is very accurate. When I add the third drive, FrontView shows only % complete and Time to complete. Now the time is almost 9 hours, but it actually completes in about 3 hours. Is this normal?
I haven't tried this on an NV+, so I really know what the normal times are. That said, usually adding more disks will make the process take longer, so this doesn't sound right.
bhf1 wrote:
3. I have gotten the NAS up to 3 drives with normal operation twice. But when I hot insert the 4th drive the NAS locks up and I have to pull the power plug. I tried just removing the 4th drive and the NAS still sticks in booting. This issue is not drive or slot dependent. I suspect the power supply can't handle 4 drives. Any suggestions on where to look in the PS?
Sandshark is a good resource on this question.
bhf1 wrote:
4. The NAS seems very sensative to anything that might upset it. For example, instead of hot inserting a new drive to expand the volume, I inserted with power off then powered up. The NAS stuck in "Booting.... Please wait" and I had to start over. Is this normal?
5. The booting process looks like it has diagnostic info. For example, the fan switches from high speed to low speed. The power button light flashes at different rates. Is there anything that documents the booting process so this info could provide clues as to why the booting fails sometimes?
I suspect your first issue is because the disk was used, and was formerly in the array. When it's hot-inserted, the NAS will format it. When you cold-insert, the NAS has to try to figure out what you've done.
There are some tests done at powerup - I don't recall seeing a lot of documentation on this. But there are some documents that identify error codes. "Please wait" tells me that it's gotten past the power up checks, and is actually booting.
- SandsharkFeb 01, 2020Sensei - Experienced User
You should try the single drive in each slot test first to see if the problem is in the SATA backplane. If that works, then it could be a weak power supply, likely the 12V, but check them all.. It's not difficult to get to the internal power connector to measure voltages. It's a modified ATX configuration. Pin-out is here: ReadyNAS_PSU_pinout.pdf . Make your measurements under load, maybe with dioffering numbers of drives.
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