ReadyNAS NV (RND4250-100NAS) hangs on boot

stanleytberry wrote:
OK. It booted without the 4th disk in place. The indicator for the 4th disk is blinking. The display indicates the correct IP address and "C: 0.1/1.3T free".

Great.

stanleytberry wrote:
Can I safely access the shares without ruining my chance of dropping the new disk in when it arrives?

Yes. Rebuilding the parity disk requires reading all the sectors on the existing drives, to construct the parity. If you can't read the data now, the rebuild process won't work anyway. If you can read the data now, you might as well. I'd probably avoid writing to it much until the new disk is sync'd, though if the remaining disks are healthy it shouldn't matter - just an abundance of caution.

stanleytberry wrote:
Should I drop the old disk back in on the chance that it really is the parity disk and that's why my USB wouldn't detect it

I wouldn't. Windows should have installed the device driver for the disk, even if it was zeroed. Similarly, Seatools will find it, even if Windows doesn't understand the format.

I had a Seagate fail similarly a few weeks ago - the NAS stayed running in my case, but the SATA channel on the drive timed out (and eventually disabled itself). Windows didn't recognize it, Seatools didn't see it. There were no SMART alerts on reallocated sectors, etc, it just failed.