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Original ower of a mint NV+ RND4210v3 w/ 4 1TB drives from 2009. Yeah, it's old, but it had been a workhorse, no real issues until now. When I moved last year, I shut it down, wrapped it in layers of bubble wrap and packed it gently. Recently unpacked it and when I powered it up I got the "Welcome" message, then it sticks in "Booting Please wait...". Soft power down didn't work, I had to pull the plug.
What I have tried:
1. Ran the memory test multiple times. All passed.
2. Took the drives out and tested the the Seagate drives with SeaTools and WD drive with DLG. SMART test passed and Short DST passed on all drives.
3. Tried a Factory Reset and it stuck on that as well. Again had to pull the plug.
4. If I remove all drives i get a "No drives" message".
5. If I put in each drive, one at a time and power up, I get "Bad drive".
6. RAIDiator doesn't find it on my network.
Yeah, I know this is an antique, but I would like to keep using it if possible. I just want to get it working again, saving the data is not a requirment. Any suggestions?
You should try the single drive in each slot test first to see if the problem is in the SATA backplane. If that works, then it could be a weak power supply, likely the 12V, but check them all.. It's not difficult to get to the internal power connector to measure voltages. It's a modified ATX configuration. Pin-out is here: ReadyNAS_PSU_pinout.pdf . Make your measurements under load, maybe with dioffering numbers of drives.
I don't think it's a power supply issue. The NV+ only has one 12V and one 5V bus, so a failure of either of those would likely cause other issues as well. Failure of the +5VSB could cause the power button to not fuction, but wouldn't prevent booting AFAIK, and certainly is unlikely to be detected as a "bad disk".
If sounds like a bad SATA backplane. Are you sure the unit didn't take any bumps with the drives installed? Are you trying drives in different bays, or all in the same one? If all in the same one, try others. If a drive works in some slots and not others, that's almost always a bad backplane.
FYI, though your unit says "V3" on the paper sticker, I'm fairly certain it is what we call a "V1" here. Silver unit with internal power supply is a V1. Black unit with power brick and "V2" on the front lable is a V2. It's a long story, just know what you have if you go looking for other solutions.
Thanks for the suggestion. Will give it a try. While I can't guarantee it wasn't bumped, I treated it with as much care as possible.
I am confused by the model number. Yes, it is all silver with an internal power supply and 4 bays. The nameplate has a sticker on the Model line that says "RND4210", but the "V3" is imprinted on the nameplate.
I am confused by the model number. Yes, it is all silver with an internal power supply and 4 bays. The nameplate has a sticker on the Model line that says "RND4210", but the "V3" is imprinted on the nameplate.
The original NV+ had three small hardware revisions -so there is a v1, v2, and v3. You have the v3. All have the same performance specs, and all use the same sparc processor. All run 4.1.x firmware.
Where this gets complicated: in 2011 Netgear released a new platform to replace the NV+, and they called it the NV+ v2. It's a completely different plaform - using an arm processor instead of a sparc, and it uses 5.3.x firmware.
So here we call all variants of the original sparc platform the "NV+ v1", and we reserve the "NV+ v2" for the arm platforms.
OK, I tried your suggestion and ran through all 16 combinations of drives and slots by powering up with only one drive in one slot at a time.. Interesting results and when I repeated some of the combinations, I got different results. So the issue is not static. Slots are on the x-axis, Disks on the y-axis
Slots
Disk 1 2 3 4
1 ND ND OK Stuck
2 BFW ND Stuck BFW
3 OK OK OK Stuck
4 OK OK OK Stuck
I re-ran Disk 2 through the 4 slots:
2 BFW BFW IFW Stuck
And re-ran slot 3 again
2 Stuck
ND = No disk
Stuck = Stuck in "Booting..... Please wait"
BFW = Bad FW
IFW = Installing FW
I tried a Hail Mary and put Disk 1 in Slot 1 and powered up with a Factory Default and crossed my fingers. It came up, formatted the drive, and seemed to be normal. I inserted Disk 2 in slot 2 to see if it would sync and it did. Then Disk 3 in slot 3 and it started syncing. Based on the Admin page projection of sync time, it should have finished about 8 am. But the log when I got up said it finished about 3am.
Then I pushed my luck and put Disk 4 in Slot 4. The NAS seemed to be locked up. I could not do a soft shutdown so I pulled the power plug. When I powered it back up, it "Stuck" on booting. Back to square 1.
Pulled the plug again, removed Disk 4, and powered back up. Now the Disk 2 light is blinking and it says "C: 0/0MB free". RAIDar sees the NAS, says it's Healthy and that Disk 2 is resyncing. FrontView came up and I got the Status log. The last entry is:
A SATA reset has been performed on one or more of your disks that may have affected the RAID parity integrity. It is recommended that you perform a RAID volume resync from the RAID Settings tab (accessible in the Volumes page => Volume tab in FrontView) The resync proces will run in the background and you can continue to use the ReadyNAS in the meantime.
The "Resync Volume" button was grayed out and there was no resync progress indicator. Now FrontView times out.
Thoughts?
Is this worth wasting time, or should I just use it for a boat anchor?
The different responses between disks and slots is rather concerning. Not sure what that means. To recap, I tested all 4 disks with the manufacturer tool and they all passed SMART & Short disk test.
Since the NAS seemed to react badly to Disk 4 in slot 4 is this a slot 4 issue?
Or maybe a weak power supply that can't handle 4 drives?
Should I abort whatever the NAS is currently doing LCD shows: 192.168.168.168 C: 0/0MB free and the LCD is not switching to show the progress percentage.
I tried a Hail Mary and put Disk 1 in Slot 1 and powered up with a Factory Default and crossed my fingers. It came up, formatted the drive, and seemed to be normal. I inserted Disk 2 in slot 2 to see if it would sync and it did. Then Disk 3 in slot 3 and it started syncing. Based on the Admin page projection of sync time, it should have finished about 8 am. But the log when I got up said it finished about 3am.
Then I pushed my luck and put Disk 4 in Slot 4. The NAS seemed to be locked up. I could not do a soft shutdown so I pulled the power plug. When I powered it back up, it "Stuck" on booting. Back to square 1.
You might try testing disk 4 in a PC using vendor tools. I realize you did that already - but if you didn't try the full erase disk (or write zeros) test, you might try that. Sometimes that will uncover issues that the non-destructive tests miss.
If it is the slot, you could of course just use 3x2TB drives, and live with a 4 TB volume.
Is this worth wasting time, or should I just use it for a boat anchor?
It's not worth a lot of time. A newer NAS will be much faster, and will have support for SMB 3. The NV+ is limited to SMB 1, which is being deprecated by both Microsoft and Apple.
Thanks. I am running some experiments, looks like they are pointing to the NAS being able to run with 3 drives, but not 4. Questions:
1. The basic process I am using is to insert 1 drive and do a Factory Reset. Once that is done and the NAS is running on one drive, hot insert a 2nd and let the volume expand. Then a third. In between I do a reboot with FS check. Does the expansion have to be done one drive at a time, or can I insert more than one drive at a time to expand the volume?
2. When I add the 2nd drive to expand the volume, FrontView shows the % complete, Time to complete, and the data rate. The time for this 2nd drive is about 5 hours and is very accurate. When I add the third drive, FrontView shows only % complete and Time to complete. Now the time is almost 9 hours, but it actually completes in about 3 hours. Is this normal?
3. I have gotten the NAS up to 3 drives with normal operation twice. But when I hot insert the 4th drive the NAS locks up and I have to pull the power plug. I tried just removing the 4th drive and the NAS still sticks in booting. This issue is not drive or slot dependent. I suspect the power supply can't handle 4 drives. Any suggestions on where to look in the PS?
4. The NAS seems very sensative to anything that might upset it. For example, instead of hot inserting a new drive to expand the volume, I inserted with power off then powered up. The NAS stuck in "Booting.... Please wait" and I had to start over. Is this normal?
5. The booting process looks like it has diagnostic info. For example, the fan switches from high speed to low speed. The power button light flashes at different rates. Is there anything that documents the booting process so this info could provide clues as to why the booting fails sometimes?
1. The basic process I am using is to insert 1 drive and do a Factory Reset. Once that is done and the NAS is running on one drive, hot insert a 2nd and let the volume expand. Then a third. In between I do a reboot with FS check. Does the expansion have to be done one drive at a time, or can I insert more than one drive at a time to expand the volume?
A simpler process is to power down the system, and move the disk to the next slot. If the system boots normally, then do some testing to read/write files to a share. NasTester can be used for that. http://www.808.dk/?code-csharp-nas-performance
Then power down, and and repeat until all the slots are tested.
No expansion would be needed with the simpler process, and your disk testing would be focused on the single slot you were testing.
But to answer your question, you can add more than one disk, but the expansion only does one disk at a time.
2. When I add the 2nd drive to expand the volume, FrontView shows the % complete, Time to complete, and the data rate. The time for this 2nd drive is about 5 hours and is very accurate. When I add the third drive, FrontView shows only % complete and Time to complete. Now the time is almost 9 hours, but it actually completes in about 3 hours. Is this normal?
I haven't tried this on an NV+, so I really know what the normal times are. That said, usually adding more disks will make the process take longer, so this doesn't sound right.
3. I have gotten the NAS up to 3 drives with normal operation twice. But when I hot insert the 4th drive the NAS locks up and I have to pull the power plug. I tried just removing the 4th drive and the NAS still sticks in booting. This issue is not drive or slot dependent. I suspect the power supply can't handle 4 drives. Any suggestions on where to look in the PS?
4. The NAS seems very sensative to anything that might upset it. For example, instead of hot inserting a new drive to expand the volume, I inserted with power off then powered up. The NAS stuck in "Booting.... Please wait" and I had to start over. Is this normal?
5. The booting process looks like it has diagnostic info. For example, the fan switches from high speed to low speed. The power button light flashes at different rates. Is there anything that documents the booting process so this info could provide clues as to why the booting fails sometimes?
I suspect your first issue is because the disk was used, and was formerly in the array. When it's hot-inserted, the NAS will format it. When you cold-insert, the NAS has to try to figure out what you've done.
There are some tests done at powerup - I don't recall seeing a lot of documentation on this. But there are some documents that identify error codes. "Please wait" tells me that it's gotten past the power up checks, and is actually booting.
You should try the single drive in each slot test first to see if the problem is in the SATA backplane. If that works, then it could be a weak power supply, likely the 12V, but check them all.. It's not difficult to get to the internal power connector to measure voltages. It's a modified ATX configuration. Pin-out is here: ReadyNAS_PSU_pinout.pdf . Make your measurements under load, maybe with dioffering numbers of drives.
Thank you for the suggestions. I did some more testing and the crucial test was when I had 3 drives synced and and the NAS was fully operational, able to read and write files no problem. I hot pulled the 3rd drive and the NAS did not report the disk pull and instead locked up. (On a previous attempt, I hot pulled a disk and the NAS did nothing. I put it back and a minute later, the NAS reported the disk was missing. Then a minute later that it was inserted. Then it locked up.) Seems like the lock up happens if I just look at the NAS the wrong way. My only use of the NAS was for backup, so I am going to retire the NAS and use the drives as USB externa back up drives. Thank you again.
