Forum Discussion

Aspirant

Apr 05, 2016

RN104 freezing during copy. How to troubleshoot?

When I try to copy files from one share to another (on the same NAS device), Windows Explorer hangs and ReadyNAS becomes unresponsive. Copying seems to work for most shares, but always causes issues ...

Tutor

Apr 19, 2016

I've been having the exact same issue ever since I purchased the 104. Here's what I know about copying files within the same share:

From Windows 7's Explorer, any file copy works by dragging the data to the client and then sending it back to the NAS.
From Windows 8/8.1/10's Explorer, file copies go blisteringly fast regardless of file size, a sure sign of proper copy-on-write behavior. However....
...that's only if I copy them one at a time with plenty of opportunity for everything to finish before starting the next file copy. If I copy in a batch (as in, two or more) then the chance of a hang goes up to... well, as far as I can tell, 100%. The copy dialog will show things starting to move, and then usually get to about a sixth of the way in to the process before simply stalling out.
By "stalling out", I mean, when I SSH in to the thing and do a 'top', it shows smbd chewing up as much of the CPU as it can get, generally 80~98%. This is accompanied by the same lack of ability to do a graceful shutdown of the NAS, ultimately requiring unplugging the sad thing and plugging it back in.

I have gone through a stupendous amount of research, reconfiguration, and time-consuming trial-and-error... but all for naught. I'll keep trying to find some workaround that isn't simply reverting to naive over-the-network copying....

alekdavis
Aspirant
Apr 19, 2016
These sounds very similar to what I'm experiencing. Thank you for the feedback, ElectricKeet. I was about to dump the device and buy myself a Synology or QNAP, but I'll hold on to it for now to see if there is something we can do.
- mdgm-ntgr
  NETGEAR Employee Retired
  Apr 19, 2016
  Shortly after encountering the problem can you send in your logs (see the Sending Logs link in my sig) and note roughly the time when the unit froze?
  - ElectricKeet
    Tutor
    Apr 19, 2016
    mdgm wrote:
    Shortly after encountering the problem can you send in your logs (see the Sending Logs link in my sig) and note roughly the time when the unit froze?
    Absolutely. I took these steps:
    Cleared the logs.
    Rebooted the RN104 (running firmware 6.4.2, but this has been happening with earlier revisions also.)
    Once accessible, I used Explorer on my Windows 10 laptop to copy (^C) a directory containing 229 files to another directory within the same share. It claimed to get through 20 files before stalling out completely. The time was around 09:36.
    Waited for Windows to give up and toss me an error message. This took several minutes, during which I bumbled around a bit within the ReadyNAS admin page and noticed a few... quirks. We'll get to those a bit later.
    Eventually, Windows popped up a dialog complaining, "Error 0x8007003B: An unexpected network error occurred." I selected "Do this for all current items" and clicked the Cancel button.
    Tried to refresh the view in Explorer. As expected, Explorer stalled trying to get anything from the NAS.
    Pulled the NAS' power cord, plugged it back in, let it boot.
    Through the ReadyNAS admin page, downloaded the logs that I have sent.
    Those quirks I mentioned?
    The unit's time is around 15m30s slow. This means that when I say I tried to copy files around 09:36, the NAS thinks it's more like 09:20 or so.
    This is despite having "synchronize time" enabled in the admin page... which, by the way, completely ignores any attempt to change the time servers.
    You know, I could have sworn I told it to clear logs, but there's an awful lot of stuff in those downloaded log files....