Forum Discussion

Aspirant

May 26, 2020

ReadyNAS Alert Message (ReadyNAS-A Volume: Critical)

I just finished replacing HDD 2 due to a disk failure. The NAS booted up and everything is great, just like when I first installed it six years ago! I had not set up Alerts to send to my email addre...

StephenB

Guru - Experienced User

May 27, 2020

rba wrote:

Is my ReadyNAS about to go BELLY UP?

Yes, that is a real possibility.

What firmware are you running on the NAS?

rba wrote:

Then I got the following message: “System volume root's usage is 96%. This condition should not occur under normal conditions. Contact technical support.”! Does anybody know what that means??

Your NAS boots from a small operating system partition (4 GB) on the disks. That partition is essentially full. Normally it's about 20-25% full, so something is wrong.

Paid tech support (via my.netgear.com) can solve this remotely.

If you have a full backup, then you could also do a factory default on the NAS, set it up again, and restore the data from backup.

It is also possible to fix it yourself with ssh if you know how to use the linux command line.

Sandshark
Sensei
May 27, 2020
StephenB wrote:
Paid tech support (via my.netgear.com) can solve this remotely.

If you have a full backup, then you could also do a factory default on the NAS, set it up again, and restore the data from backup.

It is also possible to fix it yourself with ssh if you know how to use the linux command line.
In addition to these, you need to figure out what is causing the issue, or it will happen again. I don't know if paid support will also fix that or not (though I hope so).
Are you running Plex, or any other apps? They are often the cause of this, though there are others.

BTW, that error merssage (and several earlier ones with lower levels of fullness) should also be in the log. It is good that you have set up email alerts, but a NAS is not a "set and forget" device. You need to "Check in" with the admin GUI once in a while. I recommend weekly.
- rba
  Aspirant
  Jun 03, 2020
  My problem is solved. Since my ReadyNAS was about six years old, I replaced it with a new NAS.
  - StephenB
    Guru - Experienced User
    Jun 04, 2020
    rba wrote:
    
    My problem is solved. Since my ReadyNAS was about six years old, I replaced it with a new NAS.
    
    Would have been free to do a factory reset of the NAS. Or pay Netgear ~$75 USD to fix it remotely.
    
    Perhaps do the reset after you moved to the new NAS, and use the old one as a backup.