ReadyNAS Duo v2 won't reboot or do OS reinstall

try checking the drives with manufacturers diagnostic tool (Like Seatools or WD Lifeguard). To test the chassis, try going to the boot menu without the drives. (make sure the drives are labeled accordingly before removing them from the chassis).

It seems if you get to the point where all the LEDs are lit then you have accessed the boot menu. You then press the backup button - are you sure you are pressing the correct button? Pressing it once should take you to the power led on, are you saying when you press it a second time then nothing is happening?

Do you have ssh enabled?

vandermerwe wrote:
You then press the backup button - are you sure you are pressing the correct button? Pressing it once should take you to the power led on, are you saying when you press it a second time then nothing is happening?

Yes - that's what I was expecting to happen, but after pressing 'backup' once, nothing else happens.

Do you have ssh enabled?

I haven't a clue I'm afraid. Not something I'd know anything about myself; but conceivably it might have happened during some issues I had a couple of years ago

Nhellie wrote:
To test the chassis, try going to the boot menu without the drives. (make sure the drives are labeled accordingly before removing them from the chassis).

Have tried removing the drives - that doesn't help; I have just the same inability to enter the boot menu (which suggests to me that this issue is independent of the drives, surely?)

Really struggling to know what to do here :cry:

Do you have a spare disk to put in, try again with a disk in the chassis - not one of your data disks.

The backup button is ok, not stuck?

When you remove the power cord, leave it out for a while ( a minute) before reinserting it.

I've finally got this sorted out, thank God!!
Turns out I was not following the correct procedure after all, despite apparently following the support instructions at http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/21100 to the letter. Here's what happened, which might benefit someone else reading this in future....

The instructions are as follows; however the text in red is my addition! I had been keeping the reset button pressed in, between steps 4 and 5:

1. Power off your storage system.
2. Using a straightened paper clip, press and hold the Reset button.
3. Press the Power button to power on your system.
4. Continue to press the Reset button until the Power button LED, USB and backup status LED, disk 1 LED, and disk 2 LED illuminate. Then release the Reset button!.
5. Press the Backup button to scroll through boot mode options. Your system shows the boot mode options using the LEDs, as described in the following table:

Boot Mode : Description
Normal: Power LED illuminates.
Factory Default: Disk 1 LED illuminates.
OS reinstall: Disk 2 LED illuminates.
Tech Support: USB and Backup status LED illuminates.
Skip volume Check: Power LED and disk 1 LED illuminates.
Memory Test: Power LED and disk 2 LED illuminate.
Disk test: Power LED and USB and backup status LED illuminate

6. Press and release the Reset button to confirm your boot menu selection. The system boots in the selected boot mode.

So, now that I've been able to access the boot menu I've done the OS reinstall which I've been trying to do all week, and finally the NAS is up and running again.
Maybe it's just me, but even with hindsight I still find the published instructions very unclear - not even ambiguous, just wrong. Why would Netgear not spell out properly what you need to do here? Since this model is long-obsolete, it must have been published like this for ages :evil:

Anyway, thanks very much to vandermerwe and nhellie for your support - you convinced me that somehow I had to have been doing something wrong which finally led to me to the solution

Do you have a backup? If not, this is a good time to contemplate what would have happened if the OS reinstall had not worked.

freddyfruitbat wrote:
4. Continue to press the Reset button until the Power button LED, USB and backup status LED, disk 1 LED, and disk 2 LED illuminate. Then release the Reset button!.

The word "until" implies that the reset button needs to be released after those LEDs illuminate, but I agree we could make it clearer like we do in the article for the 102 boot menu.

mdgm wrote:
The word "until" implies that the reset button needs to be released after those LEDs illuminate.

Hmm, well I think I'd take issue over that - I understood it just to be delineating the step at which you start pressing the backup button. Anyway.

vandermerwe wrote:
Do you have a backup?

Damned right I have! The alternative outcome would have been quite inconvenient and maybe a bit expensive, but I wouldn't have lost any data.

I will admit though that one thing I hadn't appreciated until this happened was that you can't simply take one of the disks in a RAID system and bung it in to a PC and access the data as normal. I bought my ReadyNAS as a means of keeping my data safer, ie protecting against a hard disk failure; so it does seem a bit ironic to me that the first time I have had a catastrophic failure since buying it three years ago, it's the chassis which let me down, and having a RAID system hasn't helped me one iota.

(Have to say though, that when I replaced one HDD in the ReadyNAS as a precautionary measure when it started clocking up bad sectors, it was a sheer delight to be able to pop the old drive out and just pop another one straight in!)