Firmware upgrade fail #19255699

Ok, so here is an update on the saga of the failed firmware up date:

Spent three hours with tech support level 2. Tech came to the conclusion that the flash mem chip was bad. I was doubtful about this as failure occurred only when the firmware update was applied. But, it could be, as the update may be larger and write to areas on the flash that were not accessed before.

A recap of what we did: a USB flash drive boot (4th flash on the boot menu for the Duo v1). The box came up and was accessible. But, without the USB drive resident, it would not boot. That concluded my tech support call, ending with the idea that the flash chip was bad.

We (the tech and I) were using Rawrite32 to create the image on the USB thumb drive. I was using the 4.1.9 firmware as located here:

http://www.readynas.com/download/RAIDiator/RAIDiator-4.1.9

The tech told me that it didn’t really matter that we were using 4.1.9 and 4.1.8 was the original version on the box. And, I was told that the box would copy over the 4.1.9 to the internal flash, if it could. Well, once it came up Frontview showed it was running on 4.1.8 not the .9 that was on the USB drive. And, when we pulled the USB drive and did a reboot it failed.

So after the call I tried to find a copy of 4.1.8, to try a USB boot with that version. But I could not find one on an official site. (Don’t trust other unknown downloads.) But, what I did find was an image copy of 4.1.8 that was really a different file than what we originally tired. It is located here:

http://www.readynas.com/download/support/ReadyNAS_USB_Flash_Recovery-4.1.8.img

I then burned this to the USB drive using Rawrite32. Behavior was entirely different. It booted up and ran for awhile then shut down. This is just what the kb article sez at:

http://www.readynas.com/kb/faq/boot/how_can_i_perform_a_boot_recovery_using_a_usb_flash_device

So after it shut down I pulled the USB drive and attempted a boot. It failed. So I did the USB boot again. This time after the shut down that is built into the img file, I did normal boot up and left the USB drive in place. I let it cook for long while till the box showed no activity. I then did a normal shutdown, pulled the USB drive out and did a boot. It came up normal like nothing had ever happened. Frontview reports no issues and it is running on 4.1.8.

At this point I am reluctant to shut it down, and even more so I am reluctant to try an update to 4.1.9.

I have a second Duo, and I am reluctant to try an update to 4.1.9 on that box.

At this point I’m thinking of moving to a RNDP600U (Ultra 6 plus), and just leave the older boxes behind. BUT, if anyone knows anything about the flash chip I could play with it (it is out of warranty) and try a new flash mem chip on the board.