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Technical challenge for RNDU4000 Ultra 4 (#16372263)
Ok, here's what I am faced with.
I had a perfectly fine ReadyNAS Ultra 4 with 4 x 3 Tb drives running 4.17 with about 3-4 Tb of data on it. I moved it to a new lan with different IP arrangement and couldn't get communications going with the RAID. So i started a factory default reset, not realizing this would format my drives and start a new RAID system. Just as it started the firmware update process (i don't think anything else runs before that) i saw the manual said it would wipe my drives, so i quickly popped out all 4 drives and turned off the RAID. I put in a spare 80 Gb drive instead and it did boot up with factory defaults upon next power on with same firmware version as before. The factory defaults set it to get an IP address from the DHCP server, and now i can attach to and work with the Ultra 4 once again, albeit with the new 80 Gb drive.
It would seem that I can just take out the 80 Gb drive and put my original drives at this point, and the whole array will come up. But i need to make sure I follow the EXACT CORRECT procedure to get my old RAID back online because i do not have a backup of this data.
I tried the phone support and after $100, 3 hours and 12 transfers, I could not even get a person on the phone coherent enough to be able to even find a technician would could actually handle the issue, but instead got passed around from dept to dept, each saying a different group handled support for this product. My fully charged phone battery finally died and I gave up trying to speak to absolute idiots in 12 different countries who could not even tie their own shoes if their lives depended upon it. Can you imagine? And these Gear Head people are supposed to support a product such as a ReadyNAS RAID? What a joke. Where are the old-fashioned American Netgear techheads i used to be able to talk to who actually WORK on the product day in and day out? Not Chinamen who never even used one or saw one!
Anyone able to help me here? Can I simply take out the 80 Gb spare and load in my 4 drives?
I had a perfectly fine ReadyNAS Ultra 4 with 4 x 3 Tb drives running 4.17 with about 3-4 Tb of data on it. I moved it to a new lan with different IP arrangement and couldn't get communications going with the RAID. So i started a factory default reset, not realizing this would format my drives and start a new RAID system. Just as it started the firmware update process (i don't think anything else runs before that) i saw the manual said it would wipe my drives, so i quickly popped out all 4 drives and turned off the RAID. I put in a spare 80 Gb drive instead and it did boot up with factory defaults upon next power on with same firmware version as before. The factory defaults set it to get an IP address from the DHCP server, and now i can attach to and work with the Ultra 4 once again, albeit with the new 80 Gb drive.
It would seem that I can just take out the 80 Gb drive and put my original drives at this point, and the whole array will come up. But i need to make sure I follow the EXACT CORRECT procedure to get my old RAID back online because i do not have a backup of this data.
I tried the phone support and after $100, 3 hours and 12 transfers, I could not even get a person on the phone coherent enough to be able to even find a technician would could actually handle the issue, but instead got passed around from dept to dept, each saying a different group handled support for this product. My fully charged phone battery finally died and I gave up trying to speak to absolute idiots in 12 different countries who could not even tie their own shoes if their lives depended upon it. Can you imagine? And these Gear Head people are supposed to support a product such as a ReadyNAS RAID? What a joke. Where are the old-fashioned American Netgear techheads i used to be able to talk to who actually WORK on the product day in and day out? Not Chinamen who never even used one or saw one!
Anyone able to help me here? Can I simply take out the 80 Gb spare and load in my 4 drives?
18 Replies
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- While I can understand that it might help if there was a "wipe disks and reinstall O/S Y/N" option, I'm not sure how it would be activated from the unit. Kind of like the early days of IBM/MS-DOS when at the C:> prompt you could enter the command FORMAT and hit ENTER and it would format the system drive. So they added a Y/N option and people still formatted the system drive by not paying attention. I did format some else's hard drive when I entered FORMAT intending to add A: to format a diskette. They asked me a question, I stopped, turned and answered their question, then turned back and hit ENTER. Fortunately the only thing on the drive was the OS. Stuff happens and that is why we pound the drum for backup, backup, backup. Never EVER trust any critical or important data to only one device.
Here is a story about catastrophic loss to drive it home.
For future reference, if you have static IP addresses on a NAS (as I do on all three of mine) then reset it back to dynamic before moving it, or not the IP address reported on the front panel, and manually set a PC to the same subnet and direct connect it to the NAS to gain access and reset the IP to dynamic. - In this case, it is a lack of information that is at fault. The factory default procedure was initiated from the SINGLE button on front of the NAS in my effort to reset the network settings. There was absolutely no statement/comment/information at ALL saying that the reset procedure would cause data loss. It would not even occur to me that resetting to factory defaults would go out to the drives and wipe out my data. Nor did it say.
I can tell you 100% that if i got a message saying it would wipe out my data, i would have STOPPED IMMEDIATELY. This is not like the DOS format command which people did day in and day out to format their floppies, so an automatic response is common. How many people have EVER asked the NAS to do a factory reset? And how often? 5% of all owners, once in a lifetime? That would be my guess.
The only way i found out my data was about to be destroyed was by accident, downloading and then browsing the manual on my PC AFTER i initiated the sequence. This is where it was stated. As soon as i saw that, i ran over to the NAS and pulled everything right in the middle of the process, since there is no other way to stop it.
Thisis just stupid. Any software engineer writing a routine to destroy data on purpose, especially 8 Tb of data, should at least have the user confirm that's what they want to do. In this case, not only was that not done, but there was not even any information on the screen that this would happen before I initiated the process. DUMB. STUPID. SHAME ON YOU NETGEAR. - I dunno.. any time I 'factory default' any other device, all data and settings are wiped.
- And i assume you never get a message telling you that .. .please!
- I understand you're mad you chose the wrong menu item (factory default vs os-reinstall), but you had to read something to even understand how to access the menu, it would make sense that you further understood what each menu item did before you hap-hazardly went about selecting it.
- 1. I am not mad
2. I did not choose the menu item. There was only ONE . factory defaults
3. I did not refer to a manual. I merely used the button on powerup to get the choice to reset factory defaults.
4. After i selected defaults, there is no message that YOUR DATA WILL BE WIPED. That is what I am talking about. HUGE oversight. HUGE. - ok well for future reference
http://www.readynas.com/kb/faq/boot/how ... _boot_menu - Both of my NVX units (currently running 4.2.17) have always shown the boot menu on the LCD display. The menu is exactly as TeknoJnky link shows.
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