I have encountered two occurences of my RN214 totally freezing or locking up, where the ONLY option I had was to unplug the unit for a power-cycle. Both occurences seem to have involved an eSATA connected external drive (that I have used without problems in the past).
In the first instance, I was running a backup job to the external drive when suddenly everything stopped, I lost connection to the NAS from my PC, and even the PC totally lost all network access! The front display on the RN214 had all lights on, but no flashing light indicating ongoing disk access. The front display showed "add_timer+c". The unit would not repsond to the power button. After a power-cycle reboot, it seemed normal again.
In the second instance, the RN214 reported that the connected external drive might have errors and would be in read-only mode until it was repaired on it's native OS. After doing that, I reconneceted the eSATA drive to the RN214, and before I could even start using the device, the NAS froze again with the deplay showing "(null)+0". All other symptoms were the same (including my PC totally loosing network access until the NAS was poer-cycled!).
Neither instance created any error messages in the log, at least none that are displayed on the ReadyNAS Admin page.
Is there any place where these error messages are documented? Multiple searches on the Netgear sites have produced nothing of value. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can troubleshoot these problems if they continue?
Thanx
Model: RN21400|ReadyNAS 214 Series 4- Bay (Diskless)
Those particular errors on the LCD are where the NAS crashed.
You might be able to find more information by downloading the log zip file from the NAS and looking in system.log and kernel.log. I also suggest testing the drive in a Windows PC with vendor tools (Seatools for Seagate, Lifeguard for Western Digital).
Thanx for the reply. The suggestion to do a full disk test is a good one - it should have been obvious, but I guess I didn't expect drive errors to cause the whole NAS to just freeze. And I was too flustered by the lock ups and surprise network problems that came with them to think about it.
That particular drive is a very old one that had heavy use with a TiVo for a few years, and since then it has done a lot of just sitting on the shelf for the past 8 years, with occasional use for temporary backups. I am running an extended test on it now.
Unfortunately, although the suggestion to run drive tests was a good one, it did not help. The external eSATA drive passed all tests, including the long generic test from Seatools and a complete chkdsk.
I have used this exact same eSATA drive with this RN214 before without problems (it has full backups of the NAS from late last year before I expanded the RAID). Today I reconnected the drive to the RN214 today and it was recognized fine. I then deleted one of the share backups from the drive without any problems, so I started a NEW backup to the drive, and about 10 minutes in the whole NAS locked up with the same "add_timer+c" error I reported in the first post above. grrrrrrrr
I generally hate all things eSATA anyway (I find them very unreliable), but since I have this drive, I wanted to use it for backups to gain the extra speed available with eSATA over USB 2.0. And since this has worked just fine in the past with this NAS & eSATA combo (same cable too), I am at a loss why I am having trouble with the backups now. I have not experienced any other problems with this RN214 other than these recent lockups when trying to do the backups. And the same backups from this NAS ran fine over my network to a different NAS yesterday, so the problem does not seem to be the backup job; it is specific to the attached eSATA drive.
Any other ideas, or should I just give up all hope of using this eSATA drive?
Unfortunately, although the suggestion to run drive tests was a good one, it did not help. The external eSATA drive passed all tests, including the long generic test from Seatools and a complete chkdsk.
I have pretty much decided that all my problems here were due to the usual flakey garbage eSATA connections. I moved that external drive to another computer where I have used it for backups in the past, and I had problems there too (eventually solved by lots of wiggling and re-seating the cable).
I just wish this NAS had a more gracefull way to deal with external drive problems than simply locking up and waiting for someone to pull the plug!
Unfortunately, the ReadyNAS uses the older, more shallow eSATA II connector because it is only eSATA II. The deeper eSATA III one is slightly better. But if your eSATA device came with an eSATA III cable, so does not fully insert in the ReadyNAS, that's the worst case. Before I gave up on them completely, I was actually using silicone glue to hold the connectors in place on my RN516. It does the job, but can be peeled off if needed. Note that you should not use the stuff you get in a hardware store that smells like vinegar. It'll eat through electronics, as it really does have acetic acid. The stuff for electronics is more expensive and comes in different thicknesses -- you want the thickest to keep it from running before it sets (which is longer than for the acidic stuff).
