I have ReadyNAS Duo (no version), which I have had for years. During a recent storm we lost power which has happened before. Unfortunately this time when I turned the NAS back on the blue power light just blinked and the disk 1 & 2 lights were solid. I tried powering down and powering up the NAS a couple of times with no change in status. After a quick review of the internet, I found that I could reset the OS via the reset button in the back. I powered down the NAS and then pushed the reset button and then powered up the NAS. I held the reset button for 10 seconds (I was waiting for the disk LEDs to blink, which they did at 10 seconds). I have been waiting for an hour or so. But all I get a slow flashing blue light, which every so often will stop flashing for a moment, dim, then the status light flashes once and then the blue light returns to flashing.All of our pictures for 10 years are stored on the NAS - there are two separate 500MB hard drives in the NAS and I am really not that technical, but I am extremely worried that I've hosed something completely. I could really use help.thank you

So you have a Duo V1.Does the light pattern match one of these? http://home.bott.ca/webserver/?p=324If you download RAIDar, what status does it give you?

Thank you.The light pattern seems to be continuous for about 45 blinks or ~40 seconds then pauses, the status light blinks there is a quick noise like a disk clicking then the pattern repeats.RAIDar can see the NAS MAC address but not the model. It saysVolume: Not DetectedDisks: Not PresentFan Status: Not PresentInfo:"Bad Disks Detected"Is there a way for me to figure out which disk is bad (I say praying that it is not both).

Power down the NAS, and try removing disk 1. Then reboot.If it continues to fail, power down again. Reinsert disk 1, and remove disk 2. Then try again.Make sure the NAS is off when you are shuffling the drives.If the NAS boots, the first thing to do is back up your data to another device.

thank you. a couple of more dumb questions. Power Down - do I pull the plug? Is it time to replace the NAS or just the disks based on your experience?

Hold the power switch down first. If that fails after a few seconds you'll need to pull the plug.I suspect the NAS is ok (and the disks themselves should still be working). But there is at least some data corruption on one.

Slow Blue Light of Death | NETGEAR Communities

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mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired
Jul 19, 2014
It's possible you could accidentally delete a file (would be immediately deleted from both disks), you could have multiple failures and a range of other issues, as well as fire, flood and theft.

Businesses use RAID in their servers and still backup their data.

If you only store irreplaceable/important data on one device then you are taking a big risk.

A few cheap USB disks rotated off-site, another NAS with the first backup on-site and subsequent backups to the NAS over the Internet to a remote location (e.g. to house occupied by parent/sibling/child depending on what suits you - you could even arrange to backup their files back to your place), backup of important data to the cloud are all good suggestions.

With 500GB disks currently in your NAS it shouldn't cost you that much to implement a backup solution.

Preferably you should have at least 3 copies of important/irreplaceable data including the primary copy.
HomeUser_MA
Aspirant
Jul 20, 2014
thank you that makes sense. is there a tutorial somewhere on how to use an external USB drive to back up the NAS? I recall trying to set something like that up when I first got the NAS, but it did not work so well so I gave up and just went with the RAID structure.
StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Jul 20, 2014
I agree with mdgm on the 3-copies (on three devices) approach. You were a bit lucky in this case.

USB is slow on the duo v1. rsync is one way to make it run quicker. There's a guide from mdgm here: http://www.rnasguide.com/2010/09/23/rsy ... -usb-disk/

You can also connect the USB drive to a PC, and back it up over your network (wired, not wifi). That is faster, and keeping the USB drive electrically separate from the Duo is perhaps a bit safer.
HomeUser_MA
Aspirant
Jul 28, 2014
New update - I went away thinking it was fine - but tonight I went to add something to the NAS drives for the first time and none of the computers can mount the drives nor can they login via the web page. Raidar sees the drive, but I cannot access the drive from Raidar either. It says that drive 1 (the drive that seemed to fail before) is at 98% resync and will be done in 4 minutes - it has said this since I logged in an hour ago. I assume that the drive is bad. So I will order a new one. Fortunately, I have the back-up from before.

Any suggestions other than powering it down and removing the bad drive?

thank you again.
mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired
Jul 28, 2014
It does sound like you have a bad disk. Probably there is a problem with disk 1 but you may wish to test both disks using e.g. SeaTools if they are SeaGate disks.

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Slow Blue Light of Death

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