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ReadyNAS Pioneer Pro corrupt flash no boot menu
HELP! When I power on my ReadyNAS Pioneer Pro, the LED screen just says ReadyNAS (does not show the drive LEDS) and the yellow activity light (on the front of the system above the USB port) lights and stays lit (there is no USB device plugged into this port). I do not care about any of the data on the drives. I just want to get the system working again. I have a VGA connector on the 16 pin port on the motherboard so I can see what happens when the system powers on. I can also access and change the BIOS with a USB keyboard. The BIOS shows my disk drives. I can not (repeat not) get to the Boot Menu. That used to work, but currently does not. When I power the unit on with the reset button pressed in and no (repeat no) hard drives in the system, I see "MBR H" on the monitor. Based on searches on the Internet, it looks like that is related to the internal flash needing to be reset. I created a USB boot recovery for x86, with a USB stick that has an LED on it to show when the stick is being accessed. That runs to completion and powers the NAS off. With only two Seagate 1TB drives (they are on the hardware compatibility list) in the system, this created the drives in a logical unit (XRAID) and the system was able to be powered on and off many times. When the unit is powered off, I remove the power cord to move the system to it's final place and then when I power the unit on it goes back to just saying READYNAS on the LED with the USB activity light lit.
This unit was powered off and disconnected from power for three months. The hardware health all looks good in the BIOS (to include the 3V battery). When I first plugged in the unit after it was unplugged for all that time, the LED said ERR: Could not find internal fla (which I am guessing is flash image).
I see there is a TFTP Boot option to help recover systems. I have not tried that since holding the power button in on the front of the unit as mentioned in the README file just powers my unit off.
I do not care if the system is restored with OS 4 or OS 6, but I need the unit to be able to boot consistantly and after the power cord is removed from the system (as power outages will eventually happen). My drives are good as I have tested them in a SATA to USB adapter with Seagate's SeaTools. I also tried other drives (on the hardware compatibility list) and I get the same results.
The process of the system being able to create the logical unit with the same two drives right after a USB recovery is not always repeatable. After powering off the NAS after a USB recovery and then removing the USB stick, sometimes when the unit is powered back on, it just says ReadyNAS on the LED screen with the activity light lit again.
With just one disk drive in the system (and no USB sticks), the system goes through it's POST test, picture included below, and then the monitor just shows a blinking cursor. Please advise if anyone has ideas on this issue.
Hello. I found some time to work on this NAS. The issue may now be permanently resolved. I moved the NAS to a place where I could get a monitor and keyboard on it. I created a video of the boot sequence and took pictures of all the BIOS settings. While I was in the BIOS, I did enable Wake-On-LAN as previously requested. I also turned off the NAS from coming back on after a power hit; that was annoying as the power would go off and then on and then off again and that is bad for electronics and data volumes. I will get an UPS sometime this year.
First, I will start with some information on those tick marks that were going across the NAS LED infinitely when the NAS would not boot. As shown in the picture below, that is from the Kernel loading and the initrd.gz loading:
I kept going back to what someone said about it being a hardware problem. Armed with that and the clue that the NAS was shipped as part of a move and never worked consistantly after it was plugged in after the move, I looked more closely at the hardware. I took off both sides of the NAS and when I was inspecting all the cables, I saw this:
At first glance, it looks mostly ok. However, that top connector is supposed to go all the way through the cutout hole in the metal and fully into the circuit board on the other side of the metal. On the other side of the metal, you can see that the connection is not fully made:
Pulling the connector out just a little bit shows that it has no chance of making this connection without hitting the metal:
The NAS was then taken even further apart. There are 3 screws on each side of the NAS that holds the front panel of the NAS in place. All of those screws were taken out and that provided access to the cicrucit board behind the front panel that this cable plugs into. The circuit board looks like this:
The board has three screws holding it into place. However, the board has a lot of play with regards to how it lines up with the cutout hole in the metal. The connector was pushed through the hole and fully connected it to the metal pins. Then the screws were put back in for the circuit board and now the connector makes a full connection with these pins. The NAS was reassembled and it has booted ten times in a row. The power was disconnected for a few hours and the NAS booted fine after power was reapplied. I can not explain why the NAS would boot some times and not boot other times when the cable was partially connected. The NAS will be tested over the next several days before declaring this a permanent fix.
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Hi Yoda1492,
Welcome to the community.
Just would like to verify as to what USB recovery version were you using? If I remember correctly we have sparc and x86 ReadyNAS units and I cannot find any information regarding a TFTP recovery for x86 units. So currently I am under the impression that you are using a USB recovery for a sparc based unit rather than the x86 one given that you are reading a readme note for the TFTP. I could be wrong in assuming that you are using a 4.1 USB recovery but just in case; below is the link for the 4.2 USB recovery.
RAIDiator 4.2: USB Recovery Tool
Regards,
Hello,
Thank you for responding so quickly! I really appreciate that. I have a ReadyNAS Pioneer Pro and it has an Intel processor and is the x86 architecture. Thank you for the link for the USB Recovery Tool process. That is the process that I used to create the USB stick. The instructions in that link say: "Units enabled with LCD will indicate that it has entered USB Recovery mode". That never happens for my unit. My LCD never says that.
I think it would help to show what I see on the VGA monitor when doing a USB recovery. It says:
Loading kernel ...
Loading initrd.gz .... ready
and then the USB stick LED flashes for a while and then the NAS powers off. I wish it would say Loading RAIDiator-x86-4.2.28 or something about the firmware being copied to the internal flash, but it never says that.
Here is a picture of the files on the USB Recovery stick:
If you see anything wrong or missing with the files on the USB Recovery stick, please advise. I am thinking it would be worth it to do this USB recovery with no disk drives in the NAS. The point of this process is to copy data from the USB stick to the internal flash inside of the NAS. I do not need any disk drives for that. Then I can test the factory reset option via the reset button to see if there are any changes getting that to work. It does not hurt to remake the USB Recovery stick so I will do that if the test with no drives does not help. It is Halloween so I will do this tomorrow and report the findings. FYI - I previously mentioned the TFTP Boot information as I saw on this forum where people had fixed this same issue (MBR H on the monitor when holding in the reset button) by following an "undocumented procedure" after talking to Netgear Support. I am not sure what that process is, but I will follow any path that leads to a working NAS. Thanks again for contacting me and please keep in touch until the issue is resolved.
Did you get the tool from here? http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/30267
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