RN104 stuck at 'boot menu', flashing power button

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StephenB wrote:

Not sure how far you can get, given the broken serial number.  But if you can get into tech support mode without the USB recovery image, then you can try to manually mount the OS partition and the data partition.  You could then copy the data off to USB disk(s).

 

It is also possible to trigger a firmware update from tech support mode.  But getting the data off the NAS first is the best approach.
It is possible to manually mount the disks from a normal linux system.

Alas, pressing the backup button doesn't cycle through the options, but stops at 'Boot Mode - Normal'; Tech support mode doesn't seem like an option. Copying the data would be a problem in itself as it is a half full 4x3TB RAID5, but I'll deal with that later, I'm not too worried that I might lose the data (but it would be nice to be able to fix the NAS in stead of having to find a big enough storage space to copy the data, get a new NAS and copying it back again.)

Sandshark wrote:

How did you attempt the original update to 6.10.10?  By USB recovery?  That would be a bad thing and specifically what Netgear warns against doing, presumably for a reason.  And I suspect that reason is that something changes in UBOOT.  Of course, your UBOOT may have sustained damage, not just be corrupt.  But if USB recovery to the same version that is already in the unit doesn't fix it, it's likely nothing can short of manually wiping and restoring the UBOOT (which I have no experience with, but do recall seeing a post here about) will fix it, and that's assuming there is no damage to it.

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Indeed, by USB recovery (there was no other option), and trying to update 6.10.10 from 6.2.4 may have made the problems worse..? However, I did some troubleshooting and that seemed like the only option. I feel like Netgear didn't do too good a job warning against it. Sure, the USB Recovery Tool Page says to only use it at the "recommendation of Netgear Tech Support", but that's about as serious a warning as Samsung telling me not to install LineageOS on their device, so it never seemed like that big a deal. It's not like I haven't done dozens of similar things on differents systems. Also, the download page doesn't mention not to install 6.10.10 on 6.3.x or older (that's merely mentioned in the release notes), that, to me, seems like a pretty big thing to omit.

Anyway, on topic: I understand plugging the disks in a different NAS would most likely not work, so even though I'm still hoping on a little miracle that will fix my NAS, I will start thinking of a way to copy the data.