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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 a...
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.
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
Hello StephenB / FramerV,
Welcome to the Fix-My-NAS party. I will start with a quick update on the test that I was doing after my last post and then I will answer StephenB's question.
I tried the USB Recovery Tool with no disk drives in the NAS and got the same results (the LCD just says READYNAS, the system goes through the recovery process and shuts off the NAS, but I never could get to the Boot Menu via the reset button). I also reset the BIOS setitngs via the "Load optimal settings" in the BIOS of the NAS, but that did not help either.
Now on to StephenB's question. The creation date on the files on my USB Recovery stick are from January 2016. I made that stick a long time ago and I can not guarantee where I got all the files from for that USB stick. With the link from you and FramerV, I decided to just recreate the USB Recovery stick. For your information, those instructions may need to be tweaked. The instructions say to:
"Extract the firmware file and release notes from the zip file to the same folder you extracted the Recovery tool."
That is easy to do. However, when you run the "usbrecovery.exe" tool to create the USB stick with both the release notes HTML file and the firmware in the same directory, you can not select the firmware to load into the USB Recovery tool. Here is a picture showing what I am talking about:
See how the HTML Release Notes file is automatically selected and in the screen grab I have the arrow selected showing that there is no other file to choose from in the list. The "Create" button is still available but I never tried that as it is asking you to choose the firmware image and not the Release Notes HTML file. Who knows, maybe that works as well. I just deleted the HTML file from the directory, re-ran the tool (it automatically selects the firmware file since the HTML file is not there), and re-made the USB Recovery stick. Note, I decided to use a different USB stick then I was using before so that I could maintain the old one as well. People are right when they say these NAS's are very picky on the type of USB stick that will work with this process. I went through several before I found one that the NAS would recognize as a boot device. It seems the older the USB stick and the smaller in storage space size the better. The instructions say to use a USB stick between 256MB and 32GB. I used a 512MB imation USB stick with an activity light and it worked fine.
Anyway, good news! I was able to change the state of the NAS. I did the USB Recovery with the new USB stick and no drives in the NAS and that completed (very quickly actually) and shut the NAS off. I then held in the reset button while powering on the NAS and was able to get to the Boot Menu! Note, this means the USB Recovery process worked and restored the firmware onto the internal flash inside the NAS. I went through the Factory Reset process and it worked flawlessly. At the end it said "Err: no drives" on the LCD which was true. I shut it all down, put in 4 of the 6 1TB Seagate disk drives and did another Factory Reset. It went to completion and the NAS booted fine. It then started resyncing the volume. That is taking awhile. Tomorrow after the resync finishes, I will do some shutdown/startup tests before moving the NAS to where I can get an ethernet cable to it. Those tests will include disconnecting the NAS from a power source for some time and then seeing if the entire process starts over where it just says READYNAS on the LCD screen when powered on. I am hoping those days are behind me.
Note this NAS has been dead like this for 5 years and 5 months. The key to fixing it was to get the motherboard to VGA adapter that allows you to see things on the monitor. I will post an update after further testing. Thanks for listening.
You don't need a VGA header cable connected to use USB Boot Recovery, but it is nice to be able to see what the system is doing. 4.2.30 is the latest firmware btw.
Does the NAS show up in RAIDar correctly i.e. with the correct model number?It would have been great if you'd asked for help years ago. It's a shame that such a great NAS model sat around unused for nearly 5 and a half years.
Hello mdgm,
Welcome to the Fix-My-NAS party! I will start with an update on the testing and then address mdgm's comments.
I let the NAS resync overnight. That completed as expected. I shut the NAS down via the power button on the front (pressing it multiple times to do a graceful shutdown), waited a little bit, powered it back on, and everything was normal. I shut the NAS down gracefully via the power button on the front of the NAS, turned off the power switch on the back of the NAS, and disconnected the NAS from power. I let the NAS sit for 12 hours, reconnected the power, powered the NAS on, and everything was perfect.
I then shut the NAS down gracefully via the power button on the front of the NAS, put the side panel on the NAS, moved the NAS to it's final destination, connected it to my LAN and a powerstrip, and powered on the NAS. The NAS just said READYNAS and sat there for a long time (greater than 30 minutes). I should have used RAIDar to try to connect to it, but I powered it off instead. The second time I powered it on, it said READYNAS, the USB activity light by the backup button stayed lit solid the whole time, and the row of tick-marks below the word READYNAS kept going from left to right like the picture below for over 30 minutes:
Over time, I have been able to get the NAS restored with various drive configurations. Later, after the NAS loses power from a power hit or being moved to a new location, the NAS seems to forget how to boot and just says READYNAS on the LCD. This has happened at least 10 times over the last 5 years.
I downloaded RAIDar 4.3.8 for windows from here: https://www.readynas.com/download/RAIDar/RAIDar_windows_4_3_8.exe
and installed it (a pop-up said it had to be installed as an admin so I installed it as an admin). It did not see the NAS. Looking at the NAS ethernet cable there was no link light on the port on the switch for the NAS or on the LED by the RJ-45 connector plugged into the back of the NAS. I let it sit for 30 minutes while I typed up this email and it just kept doing the same thing. Can someone please explain what the NAS is doing when these tick marks are going from left to right forever? I suppose if I connected the monitor I would get a clue to that. I powered the NAS off, waited a little bit and powered it back on. It booted like normal. The link light was lit for the NIC and I was able to connect to the system via RAIDar.
Notice how the disk status section is blank? That is odd for a system with 4 disk drives in it? The LCD shows 4 disk drives, the C drive, and the free space and appears normal.
I run the setup wizard in RAIDar and am greeted by a blank screen in Firefox 49.0.2.
I did add the exception to connect to the page. This used to happen with Windows 7 as well and I would just refresh the page and it would fill in the page properly. However, that is not happening with Windows 10 Home 64bit. I tried using Microsoft Edge as well and I get the same results. The system gets it's IP correctly via DHCP from my router which is set to statically provide the same IP to this MAC address. I can ping the IP of the NAS, but that is expected since the GUI connected and accepted the default login information.
Now I will address Mdgm's comments, which hopefully leads to more clues to solving the root cause of this issue. First, thanks for responding! I agree that you do not need the cable to do the USB Recovery. However, the cable enabled me to see information on the monitor (drives seen by BIOS, NAS boot order, power settings, etc.) that are needed to get the full picture for troubleshooting. But you right, in a perfect world, it is not needed to do a USB Recovery. I would recommend to remove all hard drives though as when I first connected the VGA adapter I noticed that one of the disk drives was not recognized by the NAS. I just removed that one from the rest of this testing. You asked an interesting question about the NAS showing up with the correct model number in RAIDar. That section is blank in RAIDar.
What does that mean? Thanks for the reminder that 4.2.30 is the latest firmware. I was going to use FrontView to upgrade the firmware to prove the upgrade process worked as well. Alas, FrontView is not displaying correctly so I was not able to do that. I could always do a USB Recovery with the newer firmware, but I will wait to hear from someone before doing that.
This is a great NAS model, which is why I want to get it fixed. The reason I did not ask for help before is because I have 4 Netgear NASs. I have two of them mirrored to two others as I hope to never lose data. But with this one dead, one NAS stands tall by itself living with pride and mocking NAS redundancy. If I could not do the factory reset on this one, I was going to suggest formatting the drives in the READYNAS ULTRA 6 NAS as that is pretty close to the Pioneer Pro and then moving the drives over. I was not sure if the NAS controller kept the metadata or not so I was not sure if that would work or not. Anyway, the firmware was flashed on the Pro so there is no need to do that.
Here is an interesting tidbit. The model number of the Ultra 6 does show up in RAIDar and that NAS is running firmware version 4.2.30
I can connect to FrontView with no problems for the Ultra 6 NAS. So that tells me my brower supports displaying the data and it is not a JAVA thing or something like that. The other NAS is still a blank screen. Any help from anyone would be appreciated. Like I said, welcome to the Fix-My-NAS party. Whoever can fix it permanently, wins bragging rights!
I'd like to check something. I've sent you a PM.
There is a common side-effect of USB Boot Recovery on legacy x86 systems that you may have run into.
I have replied to the mdgm's PM. Awaiting a response. Thanks to all that have tried to help so far.
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