This evening heard my NV+ from the other room (yes, that far away) and checked it out. LCD screen showed Kernal Panic message - uh oh. Ran a memory test and after a few hours I see the NAS show up in RADAR with a 'Bad disks detected' information comment. Checking the front of the unit I see that the disk LED #3 is blinking and the Power button LED is blinking fairly fast and the LCD shows the a Bad disks found message 😞
I have 4 1.5T Seagate drives installed and indeed had been getting smart error alerts occasionally on Disk 4. I tried rebooting with Disk 4 removed to no avail - so guess it's not the only offender. Have started searching the forum for this type of issue - and seems like I'm advised to check out the disks in a PC. Have never done this (just replaced a few disks in the NAS over the years) - so not sure exactly how to do this (what software or tools to go find and run). Have several terabits on the NAS so am interested to see if i can recover easily from this - but do have a back-up from a month or two back that is not too outdated.
Any pointers for best path to proceed from here would be much appreciated.
Download seatools from seagate.com - that is the tool you need.
You can connect the drives through a USB adapter if your PC doesn't have eSata or a free Sata port. The USB will be slower (unless you have a USB 3 adapter), but it is simpler. If you purchase a kit, make sure it includes a power supply.
If you want to see the SMART data there are several free PC tools, including acronis disk monitor.
BTW, it is best to label to the disks by slot number, so you know which slot to return them to.
Thanks StephenB. Have obtained the seatools and acronis software and will secure a USB adapter shortly (easier than removing a drive my only tower desktop that I have). Will then run the tools and see what they report.
So my expectations are clear - is the desire that assuming 2 disks are 'bad', that I can correct/remedy errors on at least one of the disks to get the NAS to boot? And then migrate in a new disk and then repeat for the disk that was 'repaired'? If so, any swags at the probability that this path works out?
Your hope should be that only one disk has failed. If 2 have failed you will be very fortunate to emerge from this with your data intact. 1 disk failure you should be able to just replace it.. With 2 disks failed you'll need to do something like clone the 2 bad disks and try to retrieve the volume using the cloned disks.
This is not a detailed set of instructions though. First find out what is broken by testing the disks.
Wanted to post an update to let folks know how this went. Picked up a USB-SATA adapter and went to the likely disk that was bad (#4, one that after reviewing email logs over the past year had reported on several occasions increasing Smart errors). Nothing I did however could I get the drive viewable on my laptop via the adapter (and it did have a separate power adapter). Thought maybe the drive was such a mess that it couldn't be mounted - so tried disk #2 (that had a single email alert during the past year - but one where the reallocation # jumped by more than a single sector as disk #4 had always done). Same result - could not get the drive to be viewable to run the software tools.
Decided to try the other two disks but was a bit depressed that my task was not going well. On disk #3 when I plugged it into the USB adapter, it powered up and made the squealing that sounds that drew me to the NAS at the onset of this saga. So on a lark, I went to the NAS and did a power-on with 3 disks and disk #3 out of the unit. Interesting enough it booted successfully, reported the correct errors w/ the disk gone and did a resync that completed this morning. Went to Frontview and checked everything out - all seems good. Now I am certain that before I started down this path I did a power on with 1 by 1 removing the 4 disks - hoping that I would identify the bad disk that way. Not sure if i was in too much of a hurry after trying the two 'obvious' disks and didn't let the boot process proceed far enough (that is a distinct possibility).
One last item to report - after the successful resync on the replaced disk - disk #2 (the one that had 1 reported reallocation count increase in the past year) reported a new one and jumped over 900!. Needless to say that disk is now out of the NAS and a sync is in process on the replaced drive. Need to replenish my spare drive stock now as my two spares are in the unit.
And lastly, to the question of back-up - yes do have a back-up, but it was slightly dated. I think I could have gone that route if had needed to and manually recovered most of the items not on the latest back-up if need be. After the 2nd resync is done later today, my last task of the day will be a new back-up and I won't ignore my back-up reminders again.
Thanks for the info and pointers - and if there is one take away for me - be patient on the first steps of trying to boot w/ 3 of 4 drives one by one as the first way to determine the problem disk.
When you plug the disk into the PC, windows won't recognize the format, so it won't mount the disk. However, the vendor diagnostics (seatools, WDC lifeguard, etc) should still see it and be able to test it.
Also, tools that show the SMART stats (acronis disk monitor, etc) will see it too, and will report SMART disk health.
Another takeaway is to replace disks promptly when they start producing SMART errors...
I'm glad you are back up. Generally if you have suspect disks, the best strategy is to take care of the backup first before trying the resync. However, it looks like you will get through this scrape with data intact. 🙂
