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Solid red alert LED, no network link, flashing red disk light
It has the latest ReadyNAS firmware. One disk started complaining about SMART errors but continued to function (while likely reducing performance). I bought a replacement drive but the drive was ba...
My bad. The ethernet cable was loose. When I fixed that I got a link light and found the unit at its usual IP address. (I was expecting the worst so I didn't check the basic stuff like "is it plugged in?")
And I am being really stupid because the model of disk I bought nearly matches the netgear compatibility list except that it is SAS.
Sorry to waste your time!
Thanks. I have XRAID (which means I have redundancy, right?). And, no, it does not boot. It sounds like that near-failed drive went into an absolutely failed state and the flashing red fault LED on the drive is telling me that.
Is it normal for the unit to not boot when one drive is failed? Intuitively, it sems to me like it ought to boot in a read-only mode so it can clearly tell you what state it is in. (I did not find documentation in the manual about the meaning of the fault LED on each drive. Obviously it shows a "fault" but what kind of fault and what are the next steps when the LED is flashing.)
I can see how even booting in read-only mode wears the remaining drives so if it refuses to boot it preserves those drives longer. But that also makes it impossible to back up the data which sounds like a really good idea when a drive fails.
So I have turned it off awaiting the replacement, replacement drive (it's "replacement, replacement" because I bought a replacement drive weeks ago but it turned out to be faulty).
Hi nmgeek
As StevenB said, you should remove the near-failed drive. That drives is of little use to you now. I very bad disk can certainly cause the kind of problems you report. That disk is likely to spew tons of PCI errors and sector errors. The raid is out of sync as the re-sync never completed so it will cause a problem with trying to boot as the NAS will try and (and fail) to assemble the RAID upon boot.
Best thing is to not use the faulty disk at all. With X-RAID and 4 disks you have 1 disk redundancy so given that the 3 other disks are OK, then you are fine. Boot the NAS with the 3 good disks only.
As a piece of advise, it is a very bad idea to try and re-insert a known bad disk. It triggers a re-sync of the RAID and a sync is the most strenuous process for the disks. A failing disk is almost certain to suffer a quick death during that attempted re-sync.
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