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MBerg's avatar
MBerg
Aspirant
Nov 19, 2019

Unable to boot ReadyNas Duo - best recovery option?

So I've had my ReadyNAS Duo for probably 10 years now, crazy to think. It's been rock solid. A couple weeks ago, I went to access my drive and the drive could not connect. I also had issues getting to the admin page. If I recall, I believe it was almost like page could not be found and I couldn't ping it either. It was in la la land, but the device was on and no visual indicators it had a problem. So I just shutdown by holding the blue button and waited to turn it back on. A few minutes later, I turned it on, waited for the boot process and hurray, my disk was available...

 

While I haven't been in the admin for a while, I decided I better go check the health of everything. Got the usual prompt about the logs and I went to take a look. I saw that the logs were full of how the backup didn't run because the previous job was still running. I went to click another area in the admin and got a connection refused page. That was odd. I tried to reconnect to the page and still a refused to connect. I went back to try and access the drive on my computer and again, couldn't access the drive any longer. I could still ping the device and the device itself looked normal. I have a newer computer so I had to install RAIDar utility. It showed healthy, green checks for drives and correct IP (firmware was blank). Puzzled, I rebooted the ReadyNAS again. This time it seemingly took forever to reboot, pretty much 2 days before it showed up healthy. However, could not get to drive and could not load admin page. I could ping fine. I read a few threads here and decided to see what I could recover...

 

Good/bad news is I do have a backup running, however, looking at the data it looks like the last successful backup was in March. I don't have a TON of stuff added, but I did have some things missing from the backup. Don't always count on your backups I guess, but at least I had 99%.So I shutdown the ReadyNAS again, took out the disks to do a health check. Disk 1, primary was all good, Disk 2 parity did come back with warnings of Current Pending Sector Count. I did utilize the R-Linux tool to extract the data off of the drive, but the formatting is full of random files that I will have to parse through...

 

So once that was done, I put the drives back in and it's still booting. Going on 3 days now. RAIDar still shows system starting up and green checks by drives. I do know firmware is old, I'd guess circa 2014 is the last time I updated. My question is, while I'm not going to be super concerned of having to start over, how do I try and recover "normally". I've seen an OS reinstall and also putting new disks in to update firmware and putting old disks back in or even just running on disk 1. Are any good options and what do I potentially lose by doing so? Also, is it harmful to shutdown again even though it's still "booting"? Sorry for the long post.

7 Replies

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  • StephenB's avatar
    StephenB
    Guru - Experienced User

    It sounds to me like disk 2 needs to be replaced. If you are running XRAID, the system might be stuggling to resync it.   If disk 1 is healthy, you can simply boot up the system w/o disk 2, and then hot-insert a new disk. 

     

    If it's been taking three days to boot, then I'd forcibly shut it down - not the best thing to do, but it's not that risky if you are removing disk 2, and you can't wait forever - plus you have extracted the data.

     

    The max disk your system can accept is a 2 TB (and if you want more disk space, you'd need to upgrade both disks to a larger size to get that).  If you've never replaced the disks, you might want to replace both anyway.  Seagate Ironwolf or WDC Red drives are reasonable choices for your NAS.

     

    You probably should update the firmware when you've taken care of the disks (current version for the Duo v1 is 4.1.16 ).  Also, you could set up email alerts that let you know when backups fail (as well as figuring out why they were failing).

     

    One thing you could look into is getting a new ReadyNAS, and then repurpose your Duo as a backup NAS.  The current entry level model is the RN212.  It would be much faster, and also supports SMB 3 (which matters because both Apple and Microsoft are deprecating the SMB 1 protocol that the Duo uses).

    • MBerg's avatar
      MBerg
      Aspirant

      OK, thanks for the confirmation and extra info. I was waiting to see what happens on BF to update this too, so it must have heard it was being replaced. I already did upgrade it to the max 2TB back in 2014, so we are good there. Anyways, I turned it off, pulled disk 2 and powered it up this morning. It's not booting and RAIDar doesn't see it, do I need to put in a blank disk? Drive 2 is flashing on the front.

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