RN104 freezes now will not boot (oh, and "hi", BTW)

So I'm new to this community and my first post would seem to be only an echo of many before me.

My 10 month old RN104 started freezing a couple of weeks ago.  Frustrating at first, but the frequency of freezes progressively increased, until last week it was doing it roughly every 24 hours.  Like everyone else here, digging about the log files presented nothing of interest and no clues as to why this was happening.

I took (in retrospect) a blinding good move and copied all the data off it onto a free standing USB disk one night, and ordered another RN104 (thinking that, well, maybe there *might* be a hardware issue) which I was plannig to do soon anyway.  New RN104 arrives and I dig out 4 x 500 GByte WD disks and get it going. All fairly straight forward.  I start to copy the data from the old RN104 to the new RN104, and get less than 10% copied before the old RN freezes again.  This time the it simply does not start, and freezes with a "booting..." display.  Lucky I did that other backup just in time.

Out of interest I have tried moving the 4 x 2TB disks from the old RN into the new RN and it then also fails to boot in the same fashion as the original, so I feel happy that there isn't a hardware issue.  The new RN is currently having the backup from the free standing USB disk slowly copied onto it with its disks, and all is going fine (just about getting to 95% complete now).

So, to me this sounds ilke some sort of resource availability issue, probably filesystem based, on the four disks beloging to my original RN.  So how do I look into this?  I can't plug a keyboard and screen into the RN, and turning it on as it stands presents no network access at all.  It is now truely a "black box" in all senses of the phrase :smileyfrustrated:

My current thinking is to individually (and then all at once if necessary) mount the 2 TB disks into a USB chassis and use my PC the access them directly (running linux FC22 on the computer) and see what I can see.  What will I see? Can I examine whats going on and perhaps clear out some space (or something?) and get the box booting again?

Any thoughts?

I guess I can "fix" the who problem by zapping the partion tables on the disks (with a hand full of zero blocks) and getting the RN to "Factory Install" itself again, but I would rather get to the bottom of the problem and work out how to fix or avoid it if possible.

Now doing this all backwards, I'll introduce myself a little.  I have a long history of working in IT (30 years in entirely Unix or similar systems with various storage systems), until a couple of years ago when I "got off" that career.  I now play with the kit at home for pure hobby and enjoyment, mostly.  I have two RN104s (now) one with 4 x 2TB WD disks and the other with 4 x 500GB WD disks.  I *really* like these units and am a little frustrated that one seems to have let me down.  They're both set up with most services turned off, no apps running, and the files accessed using NFS.  It may not be ideal, but it suits me.

Regards,

Jeff