Urgently need my NAS up and running. Stuck on Please wait, Booting....

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chrisl1 wrote:
Ok. Stephen. Need to get data off disks. How can disks if they are configured in a RAID structure? In Disk management all options are greyed out except to format. Gosh this is getting complicated

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I assume you have tried booting more than once.  I've had odd instances once in a while of a failed boot after a UPS-commanded shut-down and just rebooting again fixed it.

Sometimes, a single drive going bad can take down the whole system.  Remove that drive, and the system will boot, but with the volume degraded.  That will let you get at your data and replace the drive to get it back to redundant.  The problem is that you need to identify the correct drive to remove because booting with the wrong sub-set can kill the entire volume.  I'm sure that's where StephenB is going with this first.  The manufacturers' tools are the best way to identify the offending drive.  If you can boot to the boot menu, you could try the NAS disk test, but it may run into the same problem as a normal boot.  The NAS boot test uses the drive's long self-test feature and can take hours.  The quick test in the manufacturer's tool takes only minutes and may identify the problem drive.

It is possible to get the data off with a PC and a Linux boot disc, but you have to have a way to connect all the drives to the PC simultaneously.  So, lets hope the other method works.

A bad SATA backplane is still a possibility instead of the drives, but that's rare unless there was physical damage.  Insufficient power supply voltage with the added load of the drives is another.  But if your drives have also been "working fine for years", it's more likely to be one of them.