Ultra 2+ Powers On - No ethernet activity - Corrupt Firmware ? - USB Boot Recovery NOT Working

Thank you for the reply regarding trying to troubleshoot without hard drives installed.

Should have documented that indeed I have tried booting up the Ultra2+ sans any hard drives.  As you noted, removing drives reduces the troubleshooting complexity.  The ReadyNAS powers ON, cooling fan speed changes but still does not show any activity on either ethernet port using a cable and LAN connection tested several times during my troubleshooting and known to be good.  A healthy DHCP server is running on my LAN as well.  RAIDar v6 installed on my MacBook-Pro can see my older ReadyNAS NV+ v1 OK using the same ethernet cable and connection to my switch, but not my friend's Ultra2+ which I am trying to get working for him.  His data was previously backed up so data recovery thankfully is not an issue.

I have also thought to follow a suggestion from this forum to re-seat the RAM memory module and run a RAM "memory test" from the rear panel reset button boot menu.  Was able to toggle the boot menu item front panel LED pattern indicating "Memory Test = Power LED and disk 2 LED are lit", selected it and watch it cycle thru several loops of a 4 LED sequence:  Disk #1 LED,  Disk#2 LED,  Power LED,  Backup Button LED (repeats), which I think indicates the RAM memory test is running and had not yet found errors.  Let it run for 15 mins or so.

mdgm (NETGEAR Moderator) posted a reply 2018-08-05 which was very helpful giving me valuable information about the USB Recovery Boot process and the files involved that I think has helped me inch closer to being able to transfer a RAIDiator firmware file from a USB stick to the internal flash memory which I suspect is corrupted.  The new approach involves using SYSLINUX commands to prep USB memory stick as bootable and install a boot loader file "ldlinux.sys" mentioned by mdgm and it's companion "ldlinux.c32" both of which Netgear's "usbrecovery.exe" program did not generate or place on the USB stick when I ran it many times before using 5 different older USB sticks all under 4 gigs (yes ... I admit hanging onto hardware beyond a reasonable shelf life, so they were lying around just waiting for this opportunity to shine).

Should also issue a mea culpa.  Mdgm mentioned the online USB Boot Recovery instructions seemed pretty clear, though it had taken me a few tries to get the RAIDiator firmware file integrated with the output of the Netgear USB boot recovery utility.   They were good instructions, but I had mistakenly extracted the RAIDiator file one folder level above the extracted USB boot recovery utility instead as intended into the same folder.  If I'd paid more attention the Netgear online instructions clearly state to place them inside the same folder, apologies ... my bad.

What is puzzling: after executing the small Netgear "USBRECOVERY.EXE" program on my old WinXP system the target FAT32 USB memory stick contained several of the files mentioned by Mdgm, but not the important boot loader(?) "ldlinux.sys" file.  Here is what was on my USB memory stick after executing the "usbrecovery.exe" under WinXP:

initrd.gz           (2,619 KB)
kernel              (2,638 KB)
RAIDiator-x86-4.2.31      (56,026 KB)
syslinux.cfg      ( 1 KB)

syslinux.exe     (27 KB)

no "ldlinux.sys" hidden or otherwise (continued)