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Re: ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off

SamirD
Prodigy

ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off

So my lights are the same as in this previous thread:

https://community.netgear.com/t5/Using-your-ReadyNAS-in-Business/ReadyNAS-2100-won-t-boot-disk-light...

 

Unlike in that thread though, I don't have ssh access to it since it is a new unit to me and I have no idea how it was previously configured.  It has 4x 2TB drives in it and both lan ports will get IPs, but the web ui doesn't work although pinging it does work.

 

The startup sequence of lights is the blue power, some act light flashes, no drives, lan 1 and 2 start flashing (both are plugged in), then all of the lights go out for a second or so and then the only lights that are on are all 4 drive lights steady and both lans blinking in unison but without a pattern.

 

I tried removing all 4 drives and booting to see if that made a difference, and it didn't--including the 4 solid drive lights at the end.

 

I have a ReadyNas Ultra 6 (which ironically uses the same caddies as the 2100), so I'm familiar with these on os4 and the slight quirks they have.  Otherwise, I've found them to be solid units, hence why getting another one.

 

I've reached out the previous owner to see if they know of anything that they had to do to get it to boot, but I also wanted to pick the brains here.  Any ideas or thougts appreciated!

Model: RNRX4420|ReadyNAS 2100 8TB (4 x 2TB Enterprise)
Message 1 of 13
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off

Did you try tech support mode?

Message 2 of 13
Sandshark
Sensei

Re: ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off

This is a new NAS to you, so are the drives also new to the NAS? Have you ever had a working volume in this NAS?  If the drives are not new, is there something on them you want to preserve?

 

Access to SSH is controlled by the OS configuration saved on the drives, not anything in hardware.

 

One thing to try is to use your Ultra6 to create a single-drive volume and then move that to the 2100.  Just remove the drives from the Ultra with power off and start fresh with a spare drive.  Then you can power off and swap the old drives back in.

 

I thought there was a difference between the rack and desktop caddies, though they look similar.  But maybe that's just for the 1000 and 1100 rack mount units.

Message 3 of 13
SamirD
Prodigy

Re: ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off

Not yet.  I wanted to hear back from the seller first and see if there was anything in particular I had to do.  I haven't tried any of the other boot modes yet.

Message 4 of 13
SamirD
Prodigy

Re: ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off

The drives were running in the nas, so there was a working volume I believe unless it was factory reset before being sold to me.  I'm assuming there isn't anything on the drives, so I would expect to be able to wipe/reset/whatever as needed.  Hopefully I'll get some more clarifiction from this from the seller.

 

Yep, that's why I don't have ssh access and won't be able to try anything in the other thread. 😞

 

Hmmm....this is a good idea.  I already have a 12TB single drive volume in the Ultra 6 as a backup of a backup, so once the threat of tornados passes tonight, I can just move it to the 2100 and try booting it that way and see what happens.  I was going to put a 16TB in the Ultra6 anyways.

 

I was pleasantly surprised with the caddies.  Now I've got 10 caddies between two nas units. 🙂  My long term deployement of these is to put them on either side of an ipsec vpn tunnel and have an rsync job that updates one from the other nightly.

Message 5 of 13
SamirD
Prodigy

Re: ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off

So the seller mentioned that they may have gotten the disks out of order when putting them back in and recommended a factory reset, which I just initiated.  Hopefully this will solve the issue. 🙂

Message 6 of 13
SamirD
Prodigy

Re: ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off

So it must have worked!  The unit is rebuilding one of the drives for some reason, but the empty shares are visible and working and can even transfer 30MB/s during the rebuild. 🙂  I'm happy.

 

It's also nice that the interface is a twin of the Ultra6 so setting them up to be the same will be a cinch and I expect an rsync between them will be nice and fast as well. 😄

Message 7 of 13
Sandshark
Sensei

Re: ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off

It should be re-building the entire volume.  Anyway, yes, a factory default was going to be my suggestion if nothing on the drives mattered to you.  The drive order likely wasn't the issue.  More likely, the OS partition on the drives was damaged in some way.

Message 8 of 13
SamirD
Prodigy

Re: ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off

From what I could tell in the previous thread, it looks like a log file can get too large and cause problems, but the factory reset did clear it up as it is back to 100% again.  I do need to probably scrub test the entire volume before I put anything on it.  I've also thought about putting in 4x 16TB exos drives I have just to 'see what this thing can do'.  I'm sure the volume won't be able to exceed 16TB, but will it allow me to make multiple volumes?

 

I was almost certain that drive order matters on these if it is more than a single drive.  Is this definitively not the case?

Message 9 of 13
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off


@SamirD wrote:

 but will it allow me to make multiple volumes?

Yes.

 

FWIW, if you were to do a factory default with 4x16TB in place, that might well work.  Though expansion after that really wouldn't be possible.

 

The 16 TiB restriction is because the NAS normally uses 32 bit inode addresses. But if it knows that 64 bit addresses will be needed when the volume is created (because it will be larger than 16 TiB), then it is supposed to use them.  

 

There is also the 8 TiB growth limit though, so you'd need to make sure you have all 4 disks in place. 

 

Though this is not something I've tried.  If you do try it, I'd suggest making sure you are using 4.2.31.

 

 


@SamirD wrote:

I was almost certain that drive order matters on these if it is more than a single drive.  Is this definitively not the case?


It's not supposed to matter, but in practice it does matter sometimes.  If you have more than one RAID group it seems to matter more.  So I generally do recommend preserving the slot order.

 

Message 10 of 13
SamirD
Prodigy

Re: ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off

Thank you so much for the reply.  Great to know about the multiple volumes and a factory default with the 4x 16TB was what I was thinking to try.

 

This is a v1 unit, so do you think it would have any problems using 64-bit inode?

 

I actually don't plan to change the raid at all once it's set up (no matter what drives I use), so growing shouldn't matter.  I know I've got a 12TB volume running in my Ultra6 with a single drive, but I haven't scrubbed the entire drive to see if there's any issues after 8TB.

 

My Ultra6 is running 4.2.28 and the 2100 has 4.2.31 so I'm all set for a test run on 64TB. 😮  Right now I'm running h2testw on the existing new volume to see how the current drives are.  I've already done extended smart tests on all the 16TB drives so they're ready (took 24hrs/ea!).  And I just realized that I should try all 6x 16TB in the Ultra6 and see if I can get all 96TB to work in one unit.

 

Only thing I want to do before I try the 16TB drives is to upgrade the ram to 2GB since I have plenty of those modules.  I wish I had a 4GB module as I know it made a difference on the Ultra6 going to 4GB.

 

Makes sense.  I recall the manual saying to keep the order the same and that's generally what I've seen other raid controllers say as well, even with the enterprise level sas ones I have.

 

 

Message 11 of 13
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off


@SamirD wrote:

This is a v1 unit, so do you think it would have any problems using 64-bit inode?

 


Honestly I don't know.  The v1 does have a 32 bit architecture (like the NVX).

Message 12 of 13
SamirD
Prodigy

Re: ReadyNAS 2100 won't boot, disk lights on, power light off

Hmmm...I guess I can try with a single 16TB and see what that does first.

Message 13 of 13
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