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Forum Discussion
ReadyNAS NV+ will not complete booting
Hi there,
I need some guidance, please. My trusted ReadyNAS NV+, which has worked flawlessly for the better part of 8 years has decided it's time to take a break.
It disappeared from the network, RAIDar could not see it anymore and it was unresponsive to the power button to shut it down. So I pulled the plug.
On reboot, I can see the normal startup messages and the message "Checking FS" shows up very briefly, after which the display shows "Booting..." for as long as you let it.
I have read pretty much ALL the relevant posts on this board. The first thing I did was to perform a USB flash recovery with RAIDiator 4.1.14. That process completed successfully and the NAS shows up in RAIDar again. I can ping it, too. But I cannot get to the admin UI in a browser and the display remains in "Booting..."
The next thing I did is pull each drive and connect it via a SATA/USB adapter to my MacBook. The drives all mounted, even though OS X can't read them. On all but one drive, I saw three partitions show up in disk utility. Unfortunately, this is a Windows-free household, so I have no option to connect them to a native SATA adapter and run HD vendor diagnostics (I have three WD drives and one Seagate drive).
Then I went into Tech Support mode via the power switch and was able to telnet into the Box. I noticed that /var/log/frontview/enclosure.log states that no drives are present, which is clearly not true. It appears that /sysroot doesn't get mounted. Many Linux commands are just not available (df, mdadm, etc.).
I then ran "vgscan" and a volume group "c" was listed. Running vgchange -ay to activate volume group 'c' succeeded and I was able to mount that on a temporary mountpoint. Changing to that directory revealed my very familiar directory structure and suggests that the data is still there.
But without any of the familiar Linux tools (ftp, scp, nfsutils, etc.) available, I don't see how I can save the data off the drive and onto a temporary external drive. I do have some backups, but there is a reasonable amount of things that didn't make it onto the most recent backup.
Clearly, the device is long out of warranty. But I wanted to see if anyone here has any suggestions on what else I can try to regain access to the data.
Also, are there any paid support options available? I would be happy to purchase support if there is hope left to revive the device.
Any and all ideas you may have on what else I can try are greatly appreciated.
Thanks much for reading this far,
Stefan
18 Replies
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I would suggest that you check the health of the disks.
# get_ata_errors /dev/hdc # get_ata_errors /dev/hde # get_ata_errors /dev/hdg # get_ata_errors /dev/hdi
Furthermore tech support mode is intended for support use. The RAID has to be started manually in tech support mode. There is great potential to create further problems if you don't know what you are doing.
USB Boot Recovery is intended as a last reosrt and it doesn't sound like the problem you ran into was a problem with the firmware on the flash.
You could perhaps have a full 2GB OS partition.Thanks so much for responding, "mdgm".
I am aware that tech support mode is not intended for end users. Alas, I was so far unsuccessful to reach support and given the fact that the device is long out of warranty and I have not found a for-fee support option, I have to try to use the crowdsourcing approach to get my device working again. It appears to be my only option.
I do appreciate your words of caution; I am equipped with 30 years of (IT) experience about not thinking before typing and have learned the hard way to try and avoid it... ;)
I did start the RAID manually and mounted /dev/hdc on /sysroot, sorry for leaving that part out of my original post.
I did some more digging around today and it appears that disk #2 does not have a valid partion table. Compared to #2, the other three disks show a seemingly valid and similar partition structure (fdisk -l).
So I have ordered a supported replacement hard drive and will see if that gets me past the boot issue.
I am not sure where the OS partition resides, but none of the visible partions had less than 30% free disk space (as reported by df -h).
It is entirely possible that my email notification stopped working at some point due to moving and email provider changes; I am pretty sure I never updated settings in Frontview. So, I may have missed the early indications of impeding disk failure that have allowed me proactive disk swaps in the past. I'll make sure to rectify that if I can get this device back to work. It has been one of the most reliable pieces of tech in my arsenal by far.
Again, I am grateful for your comments and will update this thread with my findings once I receive my replacement drive. Thank you!
Stefan
On a Sparc NAS a disk not having a partition table is normal if using X-RAID. It is the dedicated parity disk and it is normal for it not to have the partition table on it.
You must have started out with just one or two disks.
If you have mounted the 2GB OS partition on /sysroot you can check how full it is easily using commands such as:# /sysroot/bin/df -h # /sysroot/bin/df -i
# /sysroot/usr/bin/du -csh /sysroot/*
# /sysroot/usr/bin/du -csh /sysroot/var/*
# /sysroot/usr/bin/du -csh /sysroot/var/log/*
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