Readynas104 blinking screen and won't boot with drives installed

A few days ago I noticed that the front display panel was black, with random short blinks with no text or number.

The NAS was not accessable through LAN.
I unplugged power to restart. Same problem.

I unplugged all 4 drives, and the NAS boot into "safe mode".
I tried inserting the drives, and the blinking starts again. I also tried inserting one by one. Same problem.
I then connected each drive 1-by-1 into a Icy Box USB drive. Windows can see the disks, but they are unpartioned according to Windows. I didn't dare do that because I have important data on the drives.

The NAS is currently powered on with no drives connected, and I can connect to it via ReadyCloud. I actually had to "make a new unit" (cant remember the exact wording) to connect to the NAS.

It's been a while since I fiddled around with this NAS, since it's been working I kept it alone. So, ehm.. I can't input the correct admin password when i try to connect directly to NAS via browser..... So I'm afraid im pretty stuck if I cant get the NAS to boot properly with drives installed.

I'm wondering if there is any way to fix this problem? Or is the data on all 4 drives gone?

It's now trying to download and install new firmware. Seems to get stuck on 60-90% downloading. Guess I'll give it some time...

Firmware: 6.10.3

"Status: Healty"

Sandshark
Feb 20, 2022
The LED on the power brick should be steady. Does it behave the same when the NAS is powered and unpowered? If it's only blinking when the NAS is powered, I'd say that's yet another sign it's a power issue. Still could be internal to the NAS if it's trying to draw more current that the brick can provide, but replacing the brick sounds like a reasonable next step.

19 Replies

Replies have been turned off for this discussion

StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Feb 20, 2022
Vega32 wrote:

Windows can see the disks, but they are unpartioned according to Windows. I didn't dare do that because I have important data on the drives.

That is odd. Windows can't mount them, but it should show the partitions.

BTW, there is some beta-level open source for a Windows implementation of mdadm and btrfs. I haven't tried it, but some folks have used it successfully to access their OS-6 data volumes.

Vega32 wrote:

I also tried inserting one by one.

If you have a single RAID volume, then this was a bad idea. Hopefully nothing you've done has triggered a factory reset (which reformats the drives, and does a clean install).

Have you looked at the status in RAIDar? https://kb.netgear.com/20684/ReadyNAS-Downloads
- Vega32
  Aspirant
  Feb 20, 2022
  Thanks for replying.
  
  For me it seems to be the other way around:
  Windows found new disk in disk manager. But it didnt show in "my computer" as a partition. I had the option to make one... Im not very familiar with Windows 11. But in earlier versions I could "mount" the partitions for them to show in "my computer". But I guess this would have been an option if I made a partition...
  
  But there seems to be very many odd things going on.
  
  I opened RAIDar as you suggested, and it shows the NAS as "healty". Not much more info going on in raidar.
  When I press "offline setup (LAN)" I get prompted to input password. I tried the ones most likely to be my own admin password, set years ago. But it does not enter. I thought it was because of wrong password. But: I tried default "admin" and "password", and suddenly I get in.
  
  This makes me believe that the NAS has done a complete reset. But please note that ALL of this is WITHOUT any disks connected.
  
  Are my original "NAS settings" (users, passwords, apps, etc.) stored on a partition on one of the 4 harddrives?
  Because it seems to be a complete "new NAS" when I enter the NAS IP page. And as I also stated in the original post: I had to configure the NAS as new. This is even more likely when I got to enter the setup with "Admin / password" login info.
  When I entered via RAIDar it prompts me the setup wizard.
  Even though I recently did this both before and after writing the original post... So for me it seems like something is resetting, or that the information is not stored. Maybe due to it beeing in "safe mode"?
  
  Sorry for sounding like an complete idiot, but seems that I actually am one in regards to this :) :)
  
  I can cook this down to two main questions:
  1. Is there any way to get my NAS to boot with the 4 drives inserted into the bays? When I insert them, the display starts to blink and the NAS seems dead.
  2. Is there any way for me to save the harddrive data?
  - StephenB
    Guru - Experienced User
    Feb 20, 2022
    Vega32 wrote:
    
    Windows found new disk in disk manager. But it didnt show in "my computer" as a partition.
    
    You might be a bit confused on this. Windows Disk Manager is the place where you can see the disk partitions. Though it calls them "volumes".
    
    "My Computer" can only show file systems that Windows supports - and it doesn't support the file systems used by the NAS. If you had initialized the disk (or formatted it) there, you would certainly have lost the data.
    
    Vega32 wrote:
    
    I opened RAIDar as you suggested, and it shows the NAS as "healty". Not much more info going on in raidar.
    When I press "offline setup (LAN)" I get prompted to input password. I tried the ones most likely to be my own admin password, set years ago. But it does not enter. I thought it was because of wrong password. But: I tried default "admin" and "password", and suddenly I get in.
    
    This makes me believe that the NAS has done a complete reset. But please note that ALL of this is WITHOUT any disks connected.
    
    That is because you are in safe mode, which uses the default passwords. Normally the NAS boots from the disks - and the configuration (including account credentials) are all stored on the disks.
    
    Vega32 wrote:
    
    I can cook this down to two main questions:
    1. Is there any way to get my NAS to boot with the 4 drives inserted into the bays? When I insert them, the display starts to blink and the NAS seems dead.
    2. Is there any way for me to save the harddrive data?
    
    Power down, and reinsert the disks in their correct slots. Then use RAIDar, and tell us what status it shows for your NAS.
    
    It's not 100% clear to me whether you have a bad LCD panel, or whether the NAS is completely failing to boot when disks are inserted. Do you see the normal LCD screen now that you are in safe mode?
    
    As far as offloading data goes, there are a couple of options (including installing the beta versions of mdadm and btrfs for windows I mentioned above). But let's see if we can get more info on what's happening first.