Whatever name i choose for a new share is invalid

Me too! I thought perhaps it was because I didn't wait to run the Raidiator/Raidar program until the new drives were finished making the RAID volume.

Did you use RAIDar for the initial setup of the unit? If not, I would recommend doing so. As mentioned in this post, you will need to default in order to do so, defaulting erases all information on the drives, so make sure that the information that you have placed on the NAS is backed up properly before doing so.

Using RAIDar is the preferred setup to use when first configuring a ReadyNAS.

I have done a factory reset now and am waiting for the volumes to sync. I think I know what I did wrong initially. I inserted the disks, ran raidar, clicked setup, then, as nothing appeared to happen, went in to the Raidiator dashboard and tried to use the NAS. no go, so went back and clicked setup again, entered admin and password, went back to dashboard. Of course, I realise now that i didn't give the NAS a chance to create the volume, as there was no green light under the volume column in raidar. This morning when i tried to restart the nas the machine Sent me emails about not being able to read the volume, and the share paths being invalid.

Hopefully now it will work. How do I know when it is ok to use? Will raidiator show a message?

perzec wrote:

I have a strange problem. I just installed my ReadyNAS NV+ v2 and now I'm trying to create a few shares. It seems to be impossible. Whatever name i try for my shares, I get the same reply: "Invalid share name or illegal characters in name" etc. No matter what name i choose, the response is always the same, so it can't be that it's reserved names, unless Netgear have gotten incredibly creative in reserving just about every word on the planet. I only use letters, lowercase, so that should not be the problem either. Any thoughts for what the trouble might be?

While installing my Readynas NV+ V. 2 I run into the same issue.
What I did was removing the default shares to create my own ones but once deleted the default shares, I was unable to create any kind of new share.
I resetted the device to the factory settings then, instead deleting both the default shares I only deleted "BackUp" and I used the "Media" share changing its name and adding the needed users.
This gaved me the possibility to work properly and to add new shares later.

I hope this help!

Ciao
Enzo

At the risk of going "Me too!" I just got my shiny new NV+ v2, did a factory reset and got the same problem.

A couple of things were "not completely normal" about my situation ... I wonder if any of these are common to others with this problem.

When I first plugged the disk in (which already had a partition on it - I assumed the NAS would wipe it anyway) and switched on the NAS wouldn't boot, complaining about corrupt root, I had to delete the partition manually.

The NAS shipped with an older firmware which it updated on first factory reset.

After first factory reset (through the boot menu), RAIDar never went through "Creating Volume" or "File system check" (of course, as it was the first time I'd been through I didn't realise that this was odd) and under the "System" tab, Volumes was blank. Interestingly, I think there was a green light under "Volume" at the time. Of course, now that I've had the problems, found this form and tried a second factory reset (through the ReadyNAS web interface) I notice that it probably should have gone through that.

When going through setup after the first reset, another oddity I noticed was "Host Name" and "Workgroup" initially coming up blank (second time around they were pre-filled with default info) and they didn't stick (after setup, at the system tab they were still blank).

After the first reset, the "Backup" share under Windows Explorer (after mapping as a network drive) was claiming only 4gb of capacity, it's now claiming the correct figure of almost 2TB (the NAS has a single 2TB drive in it thus far).

Funnily enough, after the second reset (through the web interface), even though the front panel and RAIDar seemed to think everything had come up (volume light green, front panel showing IP address and free/total capacity), any attempt to go into the web interface was, for a while, met with "Device is offline, please wait" ... odd, given the device is obviously "online" enough to give me a web interface telling me it's offline (with, unhelpfully, no indication as to what it's doing offline). After a while though it came back and now it's all looking a lot more sensible.

At any rate it's all working now (at least I can create shares) ... now to test if the rest of it is behaving.