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ReadyNAS Ultra 6 - ERR: Could not properly extract
I am attempting to resolve a problem with a friends Ultra 6 that has me at my wit's end. In short, an attempt had been made to upgrade this legacy unit to OS6 and during the process, the update fail...
The NAS was not caught in an OS update.
After numerous efforts way too involved to mention here (I barely understood what I was doing since I'm not a Linux guy), it turned out that the problem was one of the simplest possible. Turned out that the 1GB factory memory stick was defective. When I attempted to run a Memory Test from the Boot Menu, the test progressed for 8 seconds and then stalled.
Swapped memory between the problem machine and a good Ultra 6 and the memory test on the bad machine ran to 100% while the good machine stalled at 8 seconds. With the unit now running with good memory, all previous failed efforts (manual OS upload and factory reset) progressed through completion without encountering the "could not properly extract" error.
I have to say I'm very surprised the system would boot and run with faulty memory, which is why I didn't consider a memory test early on in this process. Needless to say, a memory test will be the first thing in my arsenal if any problems are encountered on a machine from this point forward.
Thanks to those who contributed to the thread and via PM. I definitely learned a lot while debugging this system.
It sounds like you have a bad section of flash memory, resulting in a corrupt initrd.gz and/or kernel file on it. (Likely initrd.gz since it needs to be "extracted".) The OS re-install you did (OS4.2.x style with renamed OS6 update) should have fixed that, AFAIK. You could try doing it with a real OS4.2.x update, but I doubt you'll have any more success. As you are apparently aware (but for the benefit of anyone else reading this), a pure OS6 OS re-install won't work on a legacy system.
If there is a "low level format" utility you can use on the flash when in support mode, I'm not familiar with it. I don't know if there is enough space for a second copy of initrd.gz. If there is, and you can get in via support mode, you could rename the old and put in another copy, using the original to mark off the bad spot in the flash.
- It’s not the initrd.gz or the kernel. If it was one of those it wouldn’t have booted that far.
“Could not properly extract...” indicates clearly the files that are extracted onto the root partition. Sandshark: I've attempted a number of suggestions I've received via PM, including running the command "# md5sum -c csums.md5" which returned "initrd.gz OK, kernel OK and root.tlz OK". I assume this would mean that all three of those files are not corrupted. Unfortunately, the errors I see (unable to manually upload new firmware image and persistent "ERR: could not properly extract") continue. Thanks for the input, regardless.
Is the NAS in the middle of trying to do an OS update? Maybe it's the update it can't extract from. I don't know how to stop it from continuing to try the update if that's it, though. I'm at the limit of my knowledge of the ReadyNAS boot process, so I hope whoever PMed you can point you in the right driection.
The NAS was not caught in an OS update.
After numerous efforts way too involved to mention here (I barely understood what I was doing since I'm not a Linux guy), it turned out that the problem was one of the simplest possible. Turned out that the 1GB factory memory stick was defective. When I attempted to run a Memory Test from the Boot Menu, the test progressed for 8 seconds and then stalled.
Swapped memory between the problem machine and a good Ultra 6 and the memory test on the bad machine ran to 100% while the good machine stalled at 8 seconds. With the unit now running with good memory, all previous failed efforts (manual OS upload and factory reset) progressed through completion without encountering the "could not properly extract" error.
I have to say I'm very surprised the system would boot and run with faulty memory, which is why I didn't consider a memory test early on in this process. Needless to say, a memory test will be the first thing in my arsenal if any problems are encountered on a machine from this point forward.
Thanks to those who contributed to the thread and via PM. I definitely learned a lot while debugging this system.
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