Shortly after upgrading to firmware 6.9.4 I lost the data volume and all four disks are marked red. There's an alarm saying "Remove inactive volumes to use the disk. Disk #1,2,3,4."
I have a backup of the data, but I would like to know the root cause and if there are other options than setting up the NAS from scratch and restoring.
Model: RN21400|ReadyNAS 214 Series 4- Bay (Diskless)
I believe there is more than one cause for this problem. Your best option (other than the brute-force factory reset) is to use paid support at my.netgear.com.
Netgear mods ( for instance @evan2, @Marc_V, @JohnCM_S ) might be willing to analyze your logs, and give you some information on the cause and possible solutions. So you could PM them and ask if they are willing to do that.
Yes, I agree, there might be more than one reason for this issue. Should I investigate the other possible causes? Or just factory reset and start over?
If it were my primary NAS, I'd do the factory reset and start recovering files from backup. My backups are automated, and it's fairly easy for me to switch to a backup NAS - so I wouldn't use paid support.
If you aren't in a hurry, you could ask for help from Netgear mods to analyzing the logs. There's a chance they might also want to take a look at your system remotely.
If you have ssh enabled on the NAS, you could poke around on your own I guess.
Thank you for your input. I'm running the data off an DR/alternative storage solution, so there is no rush in getting the ReadyNAS operational. My priority is finding the root cause(s) so I can rule out hardware error.
I'm not cormfortable around SSH, so if any Netgear staff would have a look at the logs that would be great.
I have a feeling it may be related to 6.9.4, as I upgraded the other day and I've had the same issue as you.
Generally speaking, there are quite a few posts reporting it after a firmware update (not necessarily 6.9.4). I'm not convinced the update itself is the cause - it's also quite possible that some checking that is done post-update (or even during the reboot) is uncovering a latent issue that was actually there before. Most people only reboot their NAS after an update.
It would be good if Netgear provided more information on the causes, and looked into prevention or repair of the more common ones. This issue happens much too often.
Not to flame anyone/anything or accuse anyone/netgear:
Don't you agree that this have been happening more often after the introduction of 6.9.3? There have been lots of new firmwares and the inactive disc/s juste showed up?
I'm one of thoose that got affected by it and never really found the root cause.
I reboot now and then, have schedules for discmanagement running and never had any errors there. Or warnings.
Anyway, i think Netgear have good products, semi decent support OF COURSE WITH exceptions to the better...
root@NAS04:~# btrfsck /dev/md127 checksum verify failed on 20176179691520 found AB26D242 wanted 00000000 checksum verify failed on 20176179691520 found AB26D242 wanted 00000000 checksum verify failed on 20176179691520 found AB26D242 wanted 00000000 checksum verify failed on 20176179691520 found AB26D242 wanted 00000000 bytenr mismatch, want=20176179691520, have=0 Couldn't read tree root ERROR: cannot open file system
Not to flame anyone/anything or accuse anyone/netgear:
Don't you agree that this have been happening more often after the introduction of 6.9.3?
I've been seeing inactive volume posts since at least 2015, with firmware as old as 6.2.4. I don't see a spike with 6.9.3, but there might have been one with 6.9.0 in last year - hard to say. They do seem to be more common with recent releases, but that might be because the installed base is growing (there were no OS 6 ReadyNAS before 2013).
Whatever the trend, this happens often enough that I think Netgear should provide more information in the UI to allow users to diagnose why their volume can't be mounted. They should also analyze the common causes to see if there are preventative measures (for example frequency of maintenance tasks, or new maintenance task that checks the file system or RAID) that could be added to the UI, or if there is some detection/repair possible in the new safe mode. They might also reconsider the SMART thresholds they are using in their alerts (and at least make them configurable).
Unfortunately I've tried to create a support case for a week, but the website is not accepting the serial number (error message "Something went wrong. Please contact support team.".
I getting a bit tired of the whole situation and don't plan on spending much more time on this now. I have a full backup but wanted to find out if the problem with the drives was 1) because of firmware upgrade 2) user/operational error or 3) product fault, so I could learn from this and hopefully avoid it in the future. I frankly don't think I'll get an answer and I think I'll just wipe the whole thing and restore data and just hope it'll be long until the disks disapear on me again.
1. Too many snapshots would get high resource of btrfs, so please just take snapshots on necessary share folders and with an appropriate frequency. 2. I advise you to run a weekly volume balance. (System -> Volumes -> Volume Settings -> Volume Schedule) 3. I advise you to set snapshot pruning occurs when the volume reaches a used capacity of 80%. (System -> Volumes -> Volume Settings -> Snapshot Pruning)
i had this problem at the first upgrade (6.9.3 to 6.9.4); i thought it maybe me... first thing i noticed it's the drive can not be write in anymore, so i start backing up before i restart; when it can copy out always do that first... i leanred that from the hard way (in tears).
and after reset everything i manually upgrade the NAS to 6.9.3... all working fine until yesterday 2018-DEC-23...
i upgraded by accident.... and now i am back in this crap again...
cannot write in and after i restart the NAS, it shows that same message as you guys.
"xxxxx volume xxxxx remove disk #1.2.3.4"
this is too painful, i have ordered a 8-bay Synology NAS...
i am switching... NAS suppose to be my backup .....
now i have to get backup space for my backups wahahahahahaha (already gone crazy)
Did anyone find out why this happend? as I've just upgrade to the latest version 6.9.5 and I've just experienced the same error message "please remove inactive disks" and when removing all disks from the system the admin console still thinks the disks are still connected and the same applies on the unit it still thinks drives 2 & 3 are plugged in as the lights are showing for disks 2 & 3.
Thanks
Model: RN10400|ReadyNAS 100 Series 4-Bay (Diskless)
Thank you for the quick reply, I have now resolved the issue, disk 2 was faulty of a RAID 5 setup, so I have removed this drive, reformatted the remaining 2 and started from scratch again, once I have replaced the faulty drive with a new one I shall copy the data across again.
