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Forum Discussion
ReadyNAS NV (original) exhibits strange booting behavior
I have a 7 years old NV box made by Infrant with two 250GB Seagate Barracuda drives. I hadn't used it for a while, but felt suddenly motivated to build a personal cloud. So, last weekend, I fired it up - it booted fine with two disk lights showing up. But, I could not access it using the latest Raidar software so I decided to do a factory reset. I had no data on the drives as it is.
After the factory reset, I started getting a corrupt root message and I could not shut down the box gracefully. After reading through the forum, I then tried to reinstall the OS a couple of times, but to no avail. I pulled out the drives and got them tested - both checked out fine. After reinserting the drives, the corrupt root problem persisted.
In order to figure out if the drives were bad, I pulled out a disk and inserted the other disk in a different tray for every separate boot attempt. One of the disks continually showed corrupt root, so I thought may be that disk is bad. With the second disk, I was making progress or so I thought because instead of corrupt root, I started seeing bad disk detected.
But interestingly, Raidar always showed a bad disk light in an empty tray! And, depending on which try the drive was inserted in, the booting would get stuck at different points and while the disk present light would glow, but not the right one. After much reading, I tried to do a USB boot recovery using the latest firmware. The drive flashed a couple of times and then nothing happened for hours except the power light flashing softly - it never shut down as it should have. I finally yanked the power cable and rebooted the device and tried to install the OS again. The box then would get stuck while Installing - the power light would continue to flash softly. The activity light and the disk lights were off.
Today, I started the process again and changed the drive bays. Now, I am getting corrupt root with this drive too. Completely flummoxed at this point. So, my questions are:
1. Is this box dead or is there some hope? I am willing to spend some more time if there is any hope at all. I don't think the box is bricked, because something is happening. I can also hear the drives turning for some time before everything but the fan goes silent.
2. I can go out and buy new drives, but don't want to do it unless there's a chance of making this box usable.
Any help or pointers from anyone would be much appreciated. I am willing to pay NetGear tech support if they can take a look at this.
Thanks!
After the factory reset, I started getting a corrupt root message and I could not shut down the box gracefully. After reading through the forum, I then tried to reinstall the OS a couple of times, but to no avail. I pulled out the drives and got them tested - both checked out fine. After reinserting the drives, the corrupt root problem persisted.
In order to figure out if the drives were bad, I pulled out a disk and inserted the other disk in a different tray for every separate boot attempt. One of the disks continually showed corrupt root, so I thought may be that disk is bad. With the second disk, I was making progress or so I thought because instead of corrupt root, I started seeing bad disk detected.
But interestingly, Raidar always showed a bad disk light in an empty tray! And, depending on which try the drive was inserted in, the booting would get stuck at different points and while the disk present light would glow, but not the right one. After much reading, I tried to do a USB boot recovery using the latest firmware. The drive flashed a couple of times and then nothing happened for hours except the power light flashing softly - it never shut down as it should have. I finally yanked the power cable and rebooted the device and tried to install the OS again. The box then would get stuck while Installing - the power light would continue to flash softly. The activity light and the disk lights were off.
Today, I started the process again and changed the drive bays. Now, I am getting corrupt root with this drive too. Completely flummoxed at this point. So, my questions are:
1. Is this box dead or is there some hope? I am willing to spend some more time if there is any hope at all. I don't think the box is bricked, because something is happening. I can also hear the drives turning for some time before everything but the fan goes silent.
2. I can go out and buy new drives, but don't want to do it unless there's a chance of making this box usable.
Any help or pointers from anyone would be much appreciated. I am willing to pay NetGear tech support if they can take a look at this.
Thanks!
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- So, I finally went out and bought a USB 2.0 external disk drive enclosure. I then downloaded SeaTools and connected the drive. I get failures on long generic tests. Does this mean that the drive is busted? SeaTools help does indicate that bad sectors on internal drives cannot be fixed.
- Yes
- OK - thanks. Tomorrow, I will try booting the readyNAS unit with a brand new WD RE3 drive
- Getting corrupt root even with the brand new drive. I think all is lost unless someone has any suggestions for fixing this.
Should I try USB boot as a last resort? - I tried USB boot recovery - no luck. The USB drive flashes for a second and then nothing happens. The power light keeps flashing for a long time. Now trying the final step - TFTP boot recovery.
- Would not try boot recovery yet.
Does the NAS boot into tech support mode if you select that boot menu option? - I do not know if the firmware I have has a tech support mode - the closest seems to be the factory boot option. It has the following modes per http://www.readynas.com/download/docume ... AS-LED.pdf. Although I must say that I have never been able to get into the memory test mode at all.
If I release the power button after the first flash, the system does show that there are no connected disks but Raidar does not detect it. I removed all disks for the time being. Should Raidar detect it or is there some other way to tell? Although I am able to gracefully shut down the system at this point.
I am wondering if I should install on old version of Firefox and see if it can connect to the IP?
Power switch pressed while power on
1st Blink at 5th second: Factory boot option, do not use
2nd Blink at 10th second: TFTP Boot / Setup TFTP server at 192.168.125.1 with kernel_conf, initrd_conf and service files
3rd Blink at 15th second: Factory boot option, do not use (Please press front power button to gracefully shutdownand reboot NAS if you run into it by mistake)
4th Blink at 20th second: USB Boot Use Raw-writer service images from tech support.
5th Blink at 25th second: Memory test: See above memory test LED patterns for test progress and result readings.
6th Blink at 50th second: TFTP recovery (System will start to boot at 53rd second even you keep pressing power switch) / Setup TFTP server at 192.168.125.1 with kernel_init, initrd_init and recovery images - Just realized that I had disconnected the Ethernet cable. Raidar is able to detect the box and show that there are no disks. But, I don't know if It's in tech support mode.
- One more update - Firefox cannot connect to the IP and neither does Telnet, although Ping works.
- The system won't boot without disks. The OS is on the disks!
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