ReadyNAS Pro 6 - power failure during boot, and now stuck at "Checking root FS"

[grumbledog]

Hello all,

So, my Pro 6 has been running fine for years, with OS6 as well. I lost power the other day, and during the reboot it started to want to convert filesystems… well, murphy struck, and I lost power again during that process.

Now my system won't boot anymore. 😞

I have tried to use a USB recovery disk, but I cannot tell if that works or not, certainly the unit is not powered off, so that implies to me that it isn't working. Sadly, I don't have a USB with a blinky light, so I cannot see if it is busy or not. I will be trying to get one of those tomorrow…

Depening on the boot, sometimes it just seems to hang, sometimes it tells me it "could not mount" very occasionally I get something like "Failed to mount RAID". There is some data on the disk that I would very much like to recover, so I don't want to restore to default if I can avoid it 🙂

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

(Note, I have seen various other messages on this board, but they all seem to point to Netgear employees jumping in and helping, so I'm not really sure what I can do to get to the next step, any advice greatfully accepted!)

Cheers,
Paul

[Streak2]

You can access the boot menu

https://kb.netgear.com/21107/How-do-I-access-the-boot-menu-on-my-ReadyNAS-Ultra-6-Ultra-6-Plus-Pro-6...

and then select one of the non data destructive options like Normal or OS re-install.

[grumbledog]

Hi @Streak2,

Thanks for the suggestions. Sadly, they didn't get me very far. Choosing either of "Normal" or "Reinstall OS" just brings up the same error messages.

Cheers,

Paul

[StephenB]

If you see "skip volume check" then try that.

What status is RAIDar telling you?

[grumbledog]

Hi @StephenB,

Sorry for the long delay in replying, I have been scrambling trying to resolve replacement services for some of the things on the box. Now I am back again to see if I can recover the data.

I tried "skip volume check", it just brings up the same error on the display:

  could not mount

  checking root FS

RAIDar cannot see any device. If I choose "Reinstall OS", then it comes up in RAIDar, it says "Checking file system…", FW version is 6.6.1. However, then it just stays in that status for many, many hours. Last time it stayed there for a day, I'll let this run again, and see if I have better luck this time.

If this fails, is there anything else that I can do to recover the data? There is only about 1GB that I really want… most of it I can lose, as they are backups anyway , although it would be nice to not have to start the backups again from scratch 🙂

Edit: So RAIDar has lost sight of the machine again, but the display has not changed, it still says that it is checking the FS. I will leave it run for a while, maybe it really is checking the FS?

Cheers,

Paul

[StephenB]

I'm not sure what it is doing. 

If you can't get the NAS to mount the volume, then you might need to use something like ReclaiMe to recover the data.  That is expensive, and you'll need to connect all the disks to a Windows PC.