NVX expansion considered harmful

+1

Some official comment from Netgear would be a extremely well received.

Just an FYI in case people are looking at this - if your filesystem fails after fsck post expansion and won't mount (eg your shares aren't available), and fsck is still continuing to report a whole tonne of errors - you may be able to get access to your data again using:

mount -t ext4 -o loop,ro,noexec,noload /dev/c/c /mount/

which worked for me to mount the filesystem read-only, despite the superblock errors and the like. All my data was intact, despite the fact that files that fsck said had doubly-linked inodes and other errors were occurring during the check.

Still no word from Netgear it seems, despite more and more people hitting the same issues.

I now have the same issue and count mount my /dev/c/c for write access anymore. I followed the command above to mount read-only and I'm pulling backups of my data.

Anyone have a solution? Was anyone ever able to get the fsck to run properly and reboot with a working filesystem?

This is a major pain for me now..... I am not a happy camper.

Can I run FSCK online with the partition unmounted? Or do I have to do with on reboot the automatic way?

scastano wrote:
Can I run FSCK online with the partition unmounted? Or do I have to do with on reboot the automatic way?

Glad you could mount your fs read-only. Once you've safely retrieved your data, you could try unmounting and running fsck manually and see what happens. If you're in the same situation as I was, expect to see thousands of errors and the fsck process to be incredibly slow. In my case, the fsck wouldn't complete due to out of memory errors (the filesystem was too large for the 32-bit address space, IIRC). At any rate, the quantity and severity of the errors implied that it wouldn't/couldn't be fixed - so I retrieved my data, and factory reset the system.

Things are better now - no issues since then, but then again I won't be trying to expand my volume (ever) again.

Hopefully your data is O.K.

I have been informed that NetGear is looking into this issue at the moment. Any solution though would be if possible to prevent users who have yet to run into this issue (i.e. have not yet expanded their volume on affected firmware) from running into this issue.

It is a good precaution to backup your data regularly, and particularly before doing things like expanding your data volume.

Keep an eye on the 4.2.23 beta thread: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=70385

NetGear has already resolved a number of other issues with 4.2.22 in the 4.2.23 beta builds available so far.

rockdj wrote:

Glad you could mount your fs read-only. Once you've safely retrieved your data, you could try unmounting and running fsck manually and see what happens. If you're in the same situation as I was, expect to see thousands of errors and the fsck process to be incredibly slow. In my case, the fsck wouldn't complete due to out of memory errors (the filesystem was too large for the 32-bit address space, IIRC). At any rate, the quantity and severity of the errors implied that it wouldn't/couldn't be fixed - so I retrieved my data, and factory reset the system. Things are better now - no issues since then, but then again I won't be trying to expand my volume (ever) again.

Yeah, I just learned the hard way here.... I've had a few problems with this device before and this last one has left me pretty salty. I surely will be opening a pretty pissed off support case about it.

I'm going to keep plugging away and see what can be done. Do you have a suggestion on any options to run fsck, or is just a simple "fsck /dev/c/c" good enough?

mgdm wrote:

Hopefully your data is O.K. I have been informed that NetGear is looking into this issue at the moment. Any solution though would be if possible to prevent users who have yet to run into this issue (i.e. have not yet expanded their volume on affected firmware) from running into this issue. It is a good precaution to backup your data regularly, and particularly before doing things like expanding your data volume. Keep an eye on the 4.2.23 beta thread: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=70385 NetGear has already resolved a number of other issues with 4.2.22 in the 4.2.23 beta builds available so far.

I'm glad they're making progress.... but this really kinda screwing up my day! hahaha Thankfully I've had problems in the past and started to basically only use my NVX for backups already anyway. Most of my primary data is already on a Nexenta box and is MUCH safer. The real issue for me is that I've got some "add-ons"... sickbeard, couchpotato, sabnzbd, etc... with some pretty customized scripts that point to particular directories, NFS mounts and things like that. To re-create and edit all of that is really a time consuming process.

I've got my fingers crossed that a manual fsck can fix some of it, but with 80% of the drive files (4 x 1.5TB drives) I'm afraid I may also run into out of memory errors. Maybe that's something support can help overcome.

Once my basic file copies are done I will run around fsck and see where it leaves me.... and yes, I will NEVER be expanding an volume again either.

Well that's not fun... I grabbed most of my data off the ReadyNAS, SSH'd in and run fsck.... got 22.1% in before I started throwing off errors like crazy and it eventually crapped out with "memory allocation failed"

What are my chances of ever recovering this? Any other things I might be able to try?