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Forum Discussion
NVX expansion considered harmful
Background A volume scan after expansion killed everything sending me a 2.2MB email full of "corrected" errors while in fact moving everything to lost+found potentially corrupted. Thus, I wanted to know whether there is a general expansion problem and tried to reproduce it with a clean install.
So, I factory defaulted my NVX (Firmware 4.2.22) with 2xWD20EFRX and 2xWD1002FBYS and no SMART errors:
So, I factory defaulted my NVX (Firmware 4.2.22) with 2xWD20EFRX and 2xWD1002FBYS and no SMART errors:
- factory default with all drives installed
- resyncing the 3TB volume
- rebooted with volume scan boot option: everything OK
- online expansion to 4TB
- resyncing again
- restoring my FrontView config manually including an iSCSI target
- rebooted
- rebooted again, but with the volume scan boot option: FAIL!
There were plenty of "corrected" errors while there are only 60 files. Some sound very worrying because IMHO they indicate a really badly corrupted volume, e.g., "Inode x has compression flag set on filesystem without compression support." I rebooted, again with the volume scan boot option and the errors were gone. Even after restoring the backup, a "fsck.ext4 -n" via SSH shows no unusual errors for a mounted filesystem.
So, please be careful when using an NVX. Maybe you should not perform any expansion at all until there is feedback from NETGEAR developers:
http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=68890#p384524
Sadly, this is nothing new, some reports date back to October 2012:
http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=67051
http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=67688
http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=69247
http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=69321
18 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- Johnny,
Have you tried an older firmware like 4.2.20 or 4.2.19? I'm wondering if this bad behavior is the result of a more recent version of the firmware. I'd try downgrading my unit but I'm still in the giant maze of support back and forth, trying to convince someone at Netgear that there's a serious problem/flaw in the firmware. - No, sorry. I cannot afford another >20h downtime. If NETGEAR does not accept that there is a problem, I will simply buy an other NAS. End of story!
- I've been tempted to just build a "ReadyNAS" myself to replace this. The unit has been down for about 1 month now with no end in sight and you can achieve the same expandability in a custom built solution using mdadm and lvm yourself and potentially do smarter things when you upgrade/replace disks. It's just not for the novice...
- I ran a test downgrading my NVX to 4.2.19 and running a factory reset. All signs point to 4.2.19 to be bug free in this regard. The system FSCKed cleanly after the initial volume build and the first expansion. It's running on the last expansion right now.
After the expansions are complete and FSCK returns fine, I'm going to try one last thing (that I'm sure I'll regret): Upgrade to 4.2.22 and run FSCK again. That should isolate FSCK as the problem or the expansion process as being the culprit in these "corrupted" volume cases. - Many thanks for your help!
- Full rebuild on 4.2.19 worked plus the upgrade to 4.2.22 w/FSCK. Now if I had to go replace/upgrade a drive tomorrow, I'd go back to 4.2.19 first. I don't trust 4.2.22 to expand anything.
- Netgear says there's a bug in the 4.2.22 expansion script that should be fixed in 4.2.23
- Did they say what the bug is? Because, I still use the volume expanded by 4.2.22 and "fixed" by fsck. If only the file system is affected, this will work. If the RAID/block layer was wrongly expanded, I would have a big problem.
- No... that's not entirely clear. If you want to be paranoid, then I'd rebuild with 4.2.19
- Reading through your original steps regarding expansion and volume checking, I'd say my issue is the same or very similar -- however, I'm running 4.2.21 on my NVX due to the failure of DLNA on 4.2.22. I attempted a volume expansion (that seemingly succeeded) but after being told by an online FS check that there were errors, attempting to restart and do an offline check resulted in failure. Dmesg had this to say:
...
EXT4-fs (dm-0): ext4_check_descriptors: Block bitmap for group 49024 not in group (block 0)!
EXT4-fs (dm-0): group descriptors corrupted!
...
after log files spewing out issues regarding inodes and the like found during the offline fsck.
So, it seems that even 4.2.21 is affected as well. Some official comment from Netgear would be a extremely well received.
EDIT: Oops, I'm actually running 4.2.21. So, maybe going back to 4.2.20 or 4.2.19 might fix it, but unless I know for sure, I don't want to risk it.
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