My 10 year old ReadyNAS 600-TL has crashed. Fortunately, I have a backup and have been able to restore my valuable family pictures and documents to my new ReadyNAS 314, EXCEPT for our recent family vacation pictures I loaded onto my RN 600 the day of the crash! Of course, the backup for that day had not run yet and I deleted all the pictures off my camera's SD card because I have been lulled to sleep by the reliability of my Infrant ReadyNAS for 10 years.
I have tried many things to get the old 600 to boot. I took it apart, cleaned it (hoping it was just overheating), and tried doing an OS re-install, but to no avail. Here is what happened when I tried to do the OS re-install (for the second time):
In RAIDar, it seemed all was going well. Got "File System Check", then "Booting" status and finally it seemed to come online. All disk lights were green in RAIDar and on the box itself with RAIDar showing me Radiator 4.1.14 in the info column. HOWEVER, I tried to "Browse" the NAS from RAIDar (hoping to quickly get the one day's worth of pictures I was missing) and nothing. I tried accessing the NAS via its IP address and FrontView, but Windows told me it could not find the IP address.
Then RAIDar's info column went back to "Booting", then "File System Check", then the RN 600 completely disappeared from RAIDar and all lights on the front of the box went off...the power was still on, fan was spinning.
I even tried taking the disks out of the 600 and put them into another ReadyNAS I have (Ultra 4+), in hopes I could gain access to the drives that way, but the Ultra 4+ wouldn't boot with the old drives in it.
Does this sound like I had a coincidental multi-disk failure or does anyone have other ideas?
Did you try running vendor diags on the disks in a PC (lifeguard for Western Digital, seatools for Seagate)?
The 600 disks would be compatible with other sparc (v1) platforms that run 4.1.x firmware. But not compatible with 4.2.x and OS 6 platforms. They could be mounted in a linux system though.
No, I have not tried. Wasn't sure if testing each disk out individually was a valid approach. As I do not have a desktop computer, nor Linux system, could I put each disk in a USB enclosure, connect that to a laptop, and run disk diagnostics on each, one at a time?
OK...I have finally gotten around to purchasing a USB SATA drive docking station (bought the Thermaltake BlacX dual HDD docking station) so I could run diagnostics on my ReadyNAS 600 HDDs. BUT, when I put one of the ReadyNAS Hitachi Deskstar drives into the docking station, my computer does not recognize the drive. I assume this is because the drives are not formatted individually for Windows.
I am trying to recover files from (what seems to be my 10 year old, bricked) my ReadyNAS 600. How can I test these drives using the USB docking station and/or recover files from them?
