Now when I boot it, it gets stuck trying to sync one of the drives. (I left it run for a VERY long time, like more than a day.) Booting and skipping the filesystem check doesn't help -- the sync is after that, and there's no way that I know of to skip the sync.
I briefly thought about just pulling out the disk that it's trying to sync, but I've read enough other articles suggesting that that's a bad idea.
I *am* able to see my shares, and the data in them. I obviously can't easily tell if everything is totally fine with no corruption, but at first glance things look good.
So now I'd like to be able to copy the data elsewhere. I have no plans to use this as a NAS in the future, I just want to retrieve my data so that I can copy it to new hardware.
I have multiple modern, Western Digital, 1TB external USB 3.0 drives. I can test that they all work on a different machine.
My problem is that I can't figure out how to get the ReadyNAS to recognize these when in tech support mode. The instructions I'm following say:
> First thing is to figure out which name your USB-Disk got by the environment. Normally it is the last device in the list. Try to mount it > to /mnt and check the contents… in my case it was /dev/sdf, because it is a 4-Bay NAS and sda,sdb,sdc,sdd are the internal storage > disks, sde is the internal flash and sdf the external hard disk.
> mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt/
I have no /dev/sdXX at all in /dev. It's mostly /dev/hdXX. I've tried everything, and nothing works. I'm limited in being able to debug this, as there's no lsusb. dmesg output is somewhat interesting, but nothing useful in this case. Comparing /dev contents before and after plugging in the drives show no difference.
Here's the current mount output:
# mount
/dev/root on / type ext2 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw)
/dev/c/c on /data type ext3 (ro,data=ordered)
Seeing that, as well as this note: > If you have found your external disk, copy your previously mounted data and your are fine. Be aware of FS-Types (you’ll need the right filesystem type on the target device)
made me think that the problem might be ext4 vs. ext3 (the first drive I tried was ext4). So I took one of my external drives, completely wiped it, made a totally new partition, formatted that for ext3, and tried again. Still no luck.
The modern drives are USB 3.0. It's possible that's a problem, although my understanding is it's supposed to just fall back to USB 2.0 if that's all that's available.
The external drives also do *not* have their own power supplies, I assume they're powered over USB. It's also possible that that's a problem, although the light on the drive *does* go on.
I'd like to try with an older, USB 2.0, external drive, that supplies its own power, but I don't currently have one. I'm seeing if I can track one down, or at least such an enclosure that I can try putting a drive in.
I'd be happy to just mount something over the network, but I'm not sure if that's possible with the ancient busybox on the ReadyNAS. I tried mounting an NFS drive, but `mount -t nfs` gives "Invalid argument".
The original article I was following mentioned copying a more modern busybox to `/bin`, but I'm in a bit of a Catch-22. Without a way to recognize a USB drive, I don't see how that's possible.
I also have a smaller (16 GB) USB thumb drive (again, that I know works), but it's not able to recognize that either.
I've tried both the one USB port on the front, as well as both USB ports on the back.
Re: How to mount USB drive in tech support mode to recover data ReadyNAS RND4000 NV+ v1
I'm not sure where you read that booting with a missing drive is a bad idea, but that's exactly what I suggest if you know which drive is creating the problem unless you are running RAID0. The volume may come up, though degraded (not redundant), but should allow you to access it and download everything over the LAN connection (which is far faster on a NV+ than the USB ports) if it does. Of course, that drive could just be the long pole and another problem comes up once it's gone. But I don't believe any damage will be done to your volume if you try.
Just don't put the drive back in with power applied if it does come up, as the NAS will attempt to re-sync it and you already have suspicion it's got problems.
I'm not sure where you read that booting with a missing drive is a bad idea, but that's exactly what I suggest if you know which drive is creating the problem unless you are running RAID0. The volume may come up, though degraded (not redundant), but should allow you to access it and download everything over the LAN connection (which is far faster on a NV+ than the USB ports) if it does. Of course, that drive could just be the long pole and another problem comes up once it's gone. But I don't believe any damage will be done to your volume if you try.
