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Forum Discussion
ReadyNAS RN104 Dead Message
I have had no problems with my ReadyNAS RN104 for 7+ years in RAID 5, when a few days ago I got this message: "Disk in channel 4 (Internal) changed state from ONLINE to FAILED." I had been running with 4x 4TB WD drives.
I hotswapped that drive in bay 4 with a new 6TB drive in the same WD drive family and after a few days, the resync seemed to complete. Last I looked it was at 85%, but the same night, I got FIVE messages all in a row, all within 6 seconds each other (bottom message was first):
This seems to suggest that immediately after a bay 4 failure, I have a bay 2 failure, all without any prior notice.
I went into the admin and while I could access some volumes, other critical volumes seemed to have no files.
At this point, I had 4 drives in the unit:
Bay 1: Original 4TB
Bay 2: Original 4TB
Bay 3: Original 4TB
Bay 4: New 6TB that presumably had been resynced (?)
Outside the unit is the old Bay 4 4TB drive
I pulled out drives 1-3 and copied all three to three new 6tb drives.
I ALSO copied the Old 4TB drive to a new 6TB drive
There were no errors whatsoever. The four drives all copied (using dd) without any issue whatsoever.
I have a total of NINE hard drives now:
All 4 original 4TBs and their copies onto 6TBs
A 6TB drive that was in Bay 4, after resync, before I shut down the machine to pull the drives.
I'm trying to figure out next steps and would deeply appreciate some guidance:
1) Is it possible that I have a bad power supply? This all happened after my lights flickered a number of times. If the psu were bad, could that give off the failures that I saw (first disk 4 and then disk 2)?
2) If I were to re-install drives, I would reinstall the 6tb copies of the first 3 drives, but WHAT drive should go in bay 4? Would it be the 6tb that was in there when the unit resynced, or the 6tb that now has the copied data from the "failed" 4tb that I pulled out of the unit?
3) Does it make sense for me to find some other 4-bay readynas and try to install the drives in that one, on the off-chance that this happened because the ReadyNas itself is bad (and the drives are fine)? These are no longer made, so is my only option a used ebay readynas RN1x4, RN2x4, RN3x4?
4) Is it possible/likely that this is all pointless because (a) when I went to access the NAS after the "dead" email, I was unable to access certain directories, or (b) I got the "dead" message, so my data is already gone?
Thanks very much in advance!
29 Replies
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rxmoss wrote:
I went into the admin and while I could access some volumes, other critical volumes seemed to have no files.
Not sure what you mean here, because it sounds like you only have one volume. Do you mean shares?
rxmoss wrote:
I'm trying to figure out next steps and would deeply appreciate some guidance:
I would start by putting in the cloned 6 TB drives in slots 1-3 (leaving slot 4 empty) with the NAS powered down. Then try booting up read-only, and see if the volume mounts. It will show degraded if it does.
StephenB wrote:
rxmoss wrote:I went into the admin and while I could access some volumes, other critical volumes seemed to have no files.
Not sure what you mean here, because it sounds like you only have one volume. Do you mean shares?
rxmoss wrote:I'm trying to figure out next steps and would deeply appreciate some guidance:
I would start by putting in the cloned 6 TB drives in slots 1-3 (leaving slot 4 empty) with the NAS powered down. Then try booting up read-only, and see if the volume mounts. It will show degraded if it does.
Thanks very much for the reply.
I am sure I am using the wrong terminology, but yes, when I went into the admin, I could see the various folders (shares?) I created long ago, but some subfolders were empty and void of content.
Thanks for your suggestion re volumes 1-3 with the cloned drives. I will try that.
Is there any reason to believe that this is a hardware and/or power supply problem? Given that the drives seem to be fine, I'm trying to figure out why readynas would have given me a drive 4 error, followed by a drive 2 error.
@rxmoss wrote:
I am sure I am using the wrong terminology, but yes, when I went into the admin, I could see the various folders (shares?) I created long ago, but some subfolders were empty and void of content.
To clarify the terminology: You had one RAID-5 volume (likely called data) comprised of four disks. You also had shares (folders) on the volume that you created with the NAS admin ui.
Keeping this straight will be helpful as you work to recover the data, as miscommunications could make things even more difficult.
@rxmoss wrote:
Is there any reason to believe that this is a hardware and/or power supply problem? Given that the drives seem to be fine, I'm trying to figure out why readynas would have given me a drive 4 error, followed by a drive 2 error.
It's hard to rule out the power supply, but I am thinking there might have been a read error on disk 2. That would have aborted the resync, and let you with a failed volume. I've seen that scenario here before.
That is one rationale for suggesting using the three cloned disks, instead of the original three. I'm suggesting leaving out the new disk 4, because we don't know if the sync actually fully completed on the new drive. Booting read-only will keep the system from changing anything on the volume for now.
It might also be useful to download/install RAIDar on a PC.
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