Hi all. I took delivery of a readynas4 ultra today, from a friend where I know it was working.I've spent a good number of hours today trying to get this thing working with little to no luck. Here's a rundown:1) Plugged in, powered on. Screen sits at "Booting..." for ever and a day. 2) Moved drives around, still sits at "Booting...".3) Raidar finds the device most of the time and will show it as 'booting'. I've left it in this state for up to 45 minutes to no avail.4) Factory Reset - sits at "Testing Disks for ages" and Raidar shows the devices in status "Testing Disks" and the 4 green LED's are flashing under the drives in Raider. Prior to this, the screen on the NAS did show testing percentage right up to 100% then sat back at "Testing Disks..."I'm at a complete loss... and I've been sitting with this on testing disks for the best part of an hour now. Any help or advice is greatly appreciated!Martin

Maybe one of the disks has failed.Can you power down, remove the disks (label order), connect them to an internal SATA port in your PC and check them (e.g. Using SeaTools for SeaGate disks)?Or failing that try a factory default with one disk removed. If that doesn't work, put the disk back in and try removing another one then doing a factory default...You may also wish to check that the memory is properly seated. It can come loose in shipment. You may wish to run the memory test.

Thanks for your reply :)I have a spare 250GB disk that I can place in the NAS and run the factory reset however my question would then be, if that works, how would I go about adding the rest of the drive and eventually replacing this 250GB one? I have 4 1TB drives that need to go in eventually. I'm not so clued up on these NAS systems and although I'm a linux admin myself, I'm more used to running things manually with standard raid setups, not via some funky software! :)

If a factory default with just your spare disk installed works that suggests you may have a problem disk.If the factory default with a spare disk works check what firmware version is running on the NAS and update it if it is an old version.What brand and model disks are you using?

Hi.The TB drives are WD Caviar Green's.

I should probably add, the guy I bought it off, he ran dban on the drives before sending it to ensure there was no data left on them. He had those drives in the NAS working up to the moment when it was pulled out of use. This new attempt with the 250gb drive has worked and I have managed to get it to setup via radar, it's installing now. I guess it'll be trial and error with the other drives to see what happens!

Newbie - ReadyNas Ultra 4 Boot Problems - case #21158089

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MartinD1
Aspirant
May 16, 2013
Bit of an update.

I tried the factory reset with just 1 drive, the 250gb one. It appeared to go well but then hung on "Booting".
I've now tried it with 2 of the Caviar Green's. The setup ran okay, I saw it installed and then I saw it creating the volume. It rebooted and sat at 'Booting...' for a while with led 2 flashing. That's now stopped flashing and led 1 is flashing. It still says 'Booting..' on the screen and Raidar is not picking up anything.
MartinD1
Aspirant
May 16, 2013
Update 2:

It just hung at 'Booting...' so I powered down and replaced drive 1 with another drive. Booted back up. It then rand a Root FS check then jumped backed to "booting...". This was confirmed with Raidar.

As of a few minutes ago, the NAS is still sitting at "Booting.." with raidar showing no drives present and no Model.

Getting a bit fed up now :(
MartinD1
Aspirant
May 16, 2013
Just happened to catch something on the NAS display when it was doing an install there (XRaid). It said "ERR: Could not properly extract.." and straight away went to "Create C: blah%"

Any idea what that is?
MartinD1
Aspirant
May 16, 2013
~Pulled 2 drives and put them in my own pc, checked them over with smart and WD LifeDiagnostics, write zero's to the drive (quick erase) and I'm trying again.

Saw the same "could not extract" error flash up but it's creating a volume now so fingers crossed.... :?
MartinD1
Aspirant
May 16, 2013
I've managed to gain access to the NAS via Telnet.

I can see that the drives are recognised by the system and are displaying correctly with sfdisk... however, I can't seem to find anything relating to 'frontview' at all apart from a log file in /var/log/frontview/

Is this thing completely screwed?
MartinD1
Aspirant
May 16, 2013
Just on the offchance a staff member can help I've updated the topic with the case number #21158089
siigna
NETGEAR Employee Retired
May 16, 2013
It almost sounds like the on-board flash might be giving you some problems. I went ahead and pulled your case into my queue, I'll follow-up with you through the ticket system. ;)
MartinD1
Aspirant
May 17, 2013
Hi Siigna

Thanks for doing that :) I've responded to your last request for info. Just so you know I've gone ahead and bought new drives which should be arriving in the next few hours so if we can't get it working I have spanking new drives that can be used for testing too.
MartinD1
Aspirant
May 17, 2013
I've tried it now with 2 brand new drives... and still have the same problem unfortunately.

Same error as before "ERR: Could not extract properly..." then it sits in a 'Booting...' loop.
mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired
May 17, 2013
That suggests the problem is with the on-board flash as siigna mentioned.

You could try a USB Boot Recovery: Unofficial ReadyNAS USB Recovery Guide for x86-based Systems

Put 4.2.22 (http://www.readynas.com/RAIDiator_x86_4_2_22_Notes) on the USB key rather than 4.2.15

After doing a USB Boot Recovery try another factory default

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Newbie - ReadyNas Ultra 4 Boot Problems - case #21158089

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