I have been using my Pro without any worries for the longest time. I am on FW 4.2.20-T32.
However, yesterday evening, while streaming a film from the NAS, suddenly it all locked up. I tried to get into Frontview, but there was nothing to do, so I triggered a graceful shutdown via the power button on the Pro. Nothing happened, and I eventually had to hold the Power button for 10 seconds, and it shut down. I let it sit for a few minutes, and started it up again. The "NETGEAR" came up in the LED, and then the "bar" started going. However, where it usually goes to the 6 markers for HDs, it just continued to go on and on with the bar, while the fans were running on max. I left it for a few minutes, I tried running RAIDar, but alas. So, I powered it down again, started it up in Boot Menu mode, ran a memory test, and then before running the disk test restarted the Pro, and it ALL worked as usual. No issues, just a normal startup, and now all is OK. WTF?
I have no idea what could have prompted such a situation. I have never seen this before, and don't know what it means when the bar just keeping repeating left->right.
Actually, the same thing just happened again, and I didn't get the logs off the Pro before it happened. The whole system just locked up, and I eventually had to hard turn it off. When I turned it back on, it took a few tries and I eventually went into the Boot Menu, selected Normal, and now it has been sitting at the "Booting..." prompt for 30 min. All 6 discs are displayed in the LED, but there is no accessing the NAS, i.e. ReadyNAS doesn't spot it.
If you have a spare drive then I would suggest you roll back to 4.2.19. Down load 4.2.19 and have it readily available on your PC. Then install the spare drive and see if you can get the unit to boot with the spare drive. (ReadyNAS units need at least one drive to boot.) If it boots, once it has booted, open Frontview and go to System and then click on update. Do not check for update. Instead, click on the local tab and then browse to the location of the saved 4.2.19 file and initiate the installation. Once you have reinstalled 4.2.19, shut the unit down and remove the spare drive. Then install the disk set, being careful to put each drive in it's original bay (marking the drives, at least temporarily is a good idea). Then on boot, go into the boot menu:
Ultra 6 / Ultra 6 Plus / Pro 6
To access the boot menu:
Power off your unit. Using a straightened paper clip, press and hold the Reset button. Press the Power button to power on the unit. Continue to press the Reset button until the status display screen shows an boot menu message. Press the Backup button to scroll through the boot mode options. Press and release Reset button to confirm your boot menu selection.
The system boots in the selected boot mode.
The first option will be the normal boot, the second option will be the factory default (caution this one will wipe your drives) the third option is O/S reinstall. This is the one you want, as 4.2.20 T32 is on the drives and 4.2.19 is now in flash memory. It will use the OS in flash memory to overwrite the OS on the drives. When finished, hopefully it will boot normally. If it does not, your remaining option is to contact technical support via an online ticket.
Thanks for the info. I actually got in contact with Netgear who looked into the system. Their first feedback was that it possibly had something to do with ReadyNAS Photos II which I just installed. They forwarded the ticket to their senior technicians, who are the ones to uninstall the add-on, and I am just waiting for their feedback this is done.
I guess what you were suggesting would install a new FW, and that would probably also uninstall the add-on, so the result would be the same, thanks for the suggestion!!!
Come on Netgear.... Have had this logged for 28 hours now, and been on the phone with them twice. The ticket (18011468) is escalated to L3, and I am just waiting for someone to pick it up and sort out the OS. The Pro is sitting in DebugMode, and the L2 guys have verified they think it is the Photo add-on.
At least now someone is working on the issue. An L3 technician wrote me that my Telnet had "expired" and I needed to set it up again, and he would into it all tonight when he got into work:)
Thanks. I am getting a bit antsy awaiting confirmation that I have not lost all the data since my latest backup, and that it'll all be OK again, so I do not have to restore for 3 days...
Well, it all got sorted out by Davinder, who just signed off the NAS.
As it turns out, it was probably backup logs so big, they were preventing a proper boot sequence. I had a few backup jobs, and one of these had a 850MB log. AHe cleaned up the startup and it rebooted just fine. I then went into frontview and deleted all the backup logs.
I think it would be an idea to prevent this in the future, by limiting how big these logs get???
There are already precautions in place to limit how big the backup job logs get. However in rare cases for whatever reason sometimes the logs aren't truncated and you get this problem.
If you go to Status > Logs > Download all logs and extract the contents of the zip file that is downloaded you will see disk_usage.log. There is 4GB OS partition mentioned in that log and you can see how full it is.
As you're running a beta one also can't rule out something going a bit weird with that. Beta releases are normally pretty solid but don't have to pass the extensive QA testing that a production release does. I would suggest you update to 4.2.20-T40.
