ReadyNas Pro progressive healing?

I have a ReadyNas Pro Business Edition from way back. Several of them actually.  One of them I thought had gone over to the other side.  But a couple days ago I was able ot resurect him and surprisingly after having been offline for a number of years and having his disks returned he regained consciousness.

So today I went to boot him up after having been offline for the better part of the week and the following happened (he is on 6.10.6 BTW).

1. Boot him up and the ReadyNAS shows up on the Front Panel and is stuck there with fans on full. I leave him running for about 10 minutes and power cycle.

2.  Boot him up and ReadyNAS shows up on the Front Panel and is stuck like before.  Wait another 10 minutes and reboot him.

3.  Boot him up and I now get the line of bars below ReadyNas on the front panel and fans ramp up.  I wait 10 minutes and the front panel just shows the bars on the FrontPanel progressing in a loop so I reboot him again.

4.  Boot him up and ReadyNas comes up the bars below Readynas progress and then I see the disks in the system icon on the front panel and the system boots up successfully.

So what explains this?  My first and only thought at this point is that the CMOS battery needs to be replaced...as what else explains the progressive behavior toward a complete boot?

Thoughts?