4200 v1 will not enter boot mode for OS reinstall

[wsneed]

I bought a used Readynas 4200 v1 in order to reuse the 2tb drives that I upgraded from in my other readynas systems.

It didn't have a flash drive in it so I followed the USB recovery steps to create one.

With a VGA monitor attached to watch the bootup it hangs with a / prompt and just sits there.

When I follow the steps to get to the boot options the power diagnostic LED and the fan LED never come on together and I've held in the reset for over two minutes waiting.

I currently have 5 - 2tb drives in slots 1-5,  tried seveal different flash, wiped the hard drives clean and am either missing something silly or about way out of my depth.

Any help from you guys would be greatly appreciated.

[Sandshark]

The older NASes are particular about the USB drives you use for recovery.  So try some others if you have them.  The older, the better.

But, if somebody was using it without the internal flash, they may have been running another OS on it, such as FreeNAS.  If they were, and updating the motherboard BIOS was part of what they did, you may be out of luck.  Just for the sake of testing whether a generic SuperMicro board was a potential replacement for the Netgear OEM one, I found that the OS would not run, even moving over a genuine internal USB drive.  I assume that's because it checks the BIOS (so there are no home-grown ReadyNASes).

My experiment was on a 4200V2, but I suspect the same would be true of the 4200V1 and 3200.

[wsneed]

I found a flash drive that works now and I can see that it boots up to the ready screen through the VGA.

However new the problem is that it refuses to get an IP from my network. I think the onboard network ports are bad.

I'll try a add-on network card and see what happens.

[StephenB]

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@wsneed wrote:

However new the problem is that it refuses to get an IP from my network. I think the onboard network ports are bad.

I'll try a add-on network card and see what happens.

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First try RAIDar and see if it detects it on the network. https://kb.netgear.com/20684/ReadyNAS-Downloads

[Sandshark]

Booting up to "READY" is not enough, if I recall correctly.  I think it should get to the point you can log in.  I don't run OS4.2.x on my 4200V2 any longer and also don't have a monitor connected to it.  But I know runing a virtual machine ends at the login prompt.

[wsneed]

Started with Raidar, then swapped NICs and cables. Finaly checked routers DHCP and found nothing was being assigned.

[StephenB]

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@wsneed wrote:

Started with Raidar,

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Did RAIDar find the NAS or not?

[wsneed]

I ended up creating a fresh USB recovery and then extracted the initrd.gz, kernal and root.tlz from R4toR6_6.9.4.bin replaced those files and deleted the RAIDiator-x86-4.2.31.zip file.

Started RAIDar and there it was. I haven't tried to recreate it using the OS4 yet but I figure I'll give OS6 a try first.