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Move to new NAS
I'm having some pretty bad luck with a couple aging Readynas Pro Pioneer. One is very likely dead. The other is in a bad way. I haven't totally given up on it yet and will try my best with the help fr...
- Just a quick note to close the loop on this thread.
The "stone dead" RN lives on... It was bad memory on this box as well. Hard to believe but of the four memory modules in two boxes, three were bad or chose the moment I replaced the PS to go bad. I've seen bad memory prevent booting but never seen it prevent even triggering the PS on. In any case, fresh memory immediately allowed it to start.
Both RNs are now running, are fully synched, have several terabytes of data and have not been the least bit unstable.
Oddly, one of them constantly reports that its UPS has been disconnected then immediately reports it being plugged in and it's a "new" UPS. Like 50 time per day. Swapping cables, swapping UPS's, using different USB ports etc makes no difference at all. But that's another thread perhaps.
Thanks to you both for your patience, assistance and valuable input.
Cheers,
Robert
Anyone have a pinout for the IDC15 VGA header on the motherboard they care to share or link to? I'm just going to cobble together a Frankenstein adaptor since it's unlikely to be useful beyond 10 minutes use...
Cheers
Cheers
https://www.pccables.com/07129.htm, but they are so cheap, I've always just bought them.
- Perfect, thank you. I had a heck of a time finding the motherboard side pinout, so that link is the ticket. I had considered just pinning 1 to 1, 2 to 2 etc but one never knows... In the end, it shows nothing. Motherboard doesn't appear to even begin posting. I'm done with that chassis, I had a feeling it was going to be fruitless but had to try to the extent of my ability. Thank you both for your patience and assistance.
But there is good news too. On the other box the last of the data has been extracted to loose drives. I'm fortunate that I had most of it and was only missing 7TB or so. So my data is safe for short term. I mean I'll only have the one copy of it all when I factory reset the RN and get it all back in place but at least things are looking brighter.
Now... Do I trust the Readynas? Maybe it was a combination of bad things - old firmware, a PS possibly at the edge of deaths door and one disk with 52 errors that I ignored too long and when that MB died, moving the disks to this box didn't help with a different firmware etc. But eventually it DID stay up with the volume in a degraded state long enough to copy a lot of data.
Put the replacement disk in and do a factory reset?
Thanks,
Robert If you are going to do a factory default and continue using the NAS, then I strongly recommend an upgrade to OS6. Before you do that, a RAM upgrade to at least 2GB is recommended. If you still have the original processor in them, then an upgrade of that will make it a lot snappier. Note that before you do a processor upgrade, you need to be on the latest BIOS, and updating that is a lot easier under OS4.2.x than OS6.
I have several ProBE and Pro6 models that have worked fine, except most of the oldest have needed a replacement supply (I bought a couple already needing one). I did upgrade the OS and memory, and the processor on the ProBE's (the Pro6 has a much faster CPU from the factory). I retired them only because I decided to go rack-mount, not because I lost faith in them.
- I'm keen to forgive and forget. I jammed the new disk in and did a factory reset, just waiting for disks to sync.
I made the move to OS6 several years ago and upgraded the CPU to the limit of the board as well as installing new RAM, though I don't recall how much. It would have been at the recommendation of this forum or possibly the most the board supports.
Thanks to all who contributed to this thread, your input is truly appreciated and it reminds me how helpful this community has been for me over the years.
I won't close this now only because, although the working RN has been stable, it's only been a few days of hoovering data from it. It has taken only one client, and I've yet to copy anything to it. It's likely fine now, but knock on wood...
I any case, I WILL return to close the loop on this in a week or so to mark the thread as solved.
Cheers,
Robert - Well folks I'm back and increasingly frustrated. The very unit that ran seemingly stable in a degraded state and allowed me to offload all my data onto loose disks is back to causing me grief.
To recap, 5 of these disks where in another RN chassis along with a disk that was apparently bad. I tried to replace the PS and intended to swap a new replacement disk in but that chassis seemingly failed (now is written off). So I put the 5 working and a new one in this other chassis and had nothing but issues, it failed resync with the new disk after many hours. I hung I should say and wouldn't reboot sometimes and other times it would but trying to copy data from it or when resyncing it would just hang. Even updating the firmware was problematic but it did seem to eventually work. Finally it started working with the new disk removed and I was able to get the data off over several days of copying.
So now I put the new disk back in and did a factory reset. All seemed well and resync started. Today it was hung at 88.xx %. Would not reboot, just stuck at ReadyNAS on the display. So tried with the reset pin and could only get the menu once in 5 or 6 reboots. But anything I selected there just did nothing, essentially hung. I eventually got it to react when I took that new disk out. After literally 2 hours of trying every combination of operations and battling with not booting its finally back up with just the 5 disks and I did a factory reset. It's now resyncing and tells me it needa 50 hours.
I'm very frustrated. The old disks are 8TB WD Red NAS drives. The single new disk is an 8TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drive. Can you not mix? The WD are 5400 and the Seagate is 7200. Is that a problem, but if so why does it all sync for 30+ hours before it hangs? Is it possible that the firmware install is corrupt or something? Can the same version of FW be downloaded and installed "over top" or will it not do it because it's the same version? I don't think I'm doing anything wrong here but it's really stressing me out. I also note that at one point all 5 of the old drives showed no Ata errors when I hover the mouse over them. But now 3 show 1 Ata error each. Should I be concerned about that?
I'm just sick over this and every step takes hours/days.
Sorry to vent.
Robert - Well that didn't last long, I went back to the RN and noted it displayed Readynas and the small vertical bars progressing from left to right below, quickly again and again and the fan on high speed. Had to restart it. I did note when it did the volume check it got tp 99% and the hash marks across the screen just before it carried on briefly showed:
#####0p at the end. I've never seen that before. It's came up and returned to resyncing, now it says 24 hours to resync.
Robert
WildPhydeaux wrote:
I'm very frustrated. The old disks are 8TB WD Red NAS drives. The single new disk is an 8TB Seagate IronWolf NAS drive. Can you not mix? The WD are 5400 and the Seagate is 7200. Is that a problem, but if so why does it all sync for 30+ hours before it hangs?You can mix, though the slower drives can limit the RAID performance. FWIW, many of older WD Red/Red Plus report 5400 rpm, but actually spin at 7200. https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/09/04/what-madness-is-this-wd-5400-rpm-8tb-drives-sound-like-faster-7200-rpm-spinners/
The hang is of course concerning, and suggests there might be a problem with another one of the drives. Using smartctl -x with ssh might give you some more information.
- Thanks for hanging in there with me.
I can't run the Smart Control command on the RN because it will no longer boot no matter what I do. It just comes up with ReadyNAS in the display and never does anything further. This is regardless of which or how many disks are in it or if I'm holding the reset pin on the back or not. I realize that sounds like a failing PS but it has a new PS.
I put the drives in my spare Linux PC, one at a time (I have a hot swap bay) and ran the smartctl - x command on them all and captured outputs into txt files. Of the six original drives one has Device Error Count=0, four have 1 error each and the bad one has 151. The new replacement shows 0 error count.
I mean, they all have several years of use but the above doesn't seem like it should be an issue.
Perhaps bad memory? Sure be nice if I could run a memory test but I can't get it running to get to the menu. Should the RN normally be able to boot or at least get to the menu with 1 disk or what is the minimum number it can boot with?
I mean, what else is there? I'm not taking the CPU out and rubbing on balloons or something, the box hasn't been apart since I put the new PS in and has logged plenty of hours when I copied the data off.
I'm really stumped at what to try next.
Robert
WildPhydeaux wrote:
I put the drives in my spare Linux PC, one at a time (I have a hot swap bay) and ran the smartctl - x command on them all and captured outputs into txt files. Of the six original drives one has Device Error Count=0, four have 1 error each and the bad one has 151. The new replacement shows 0 error count.
I mean, they all have several years of use but the above doesn't seem like it should be an issue.I agree.
WildPhydeaux wrote:
I can't run the Smart Control command on the RN because it will no longer boot no matter what I do. It just comes up with ReadyNAS in the display and never does anything further. This is regardless of which or how many disks are in it or if I'm holding the reset pin on the back or not. I realize that sounds like a failing PS but it has a new PS.
Perhaps bad memory? Sure be nice if I could run a memory test but I can't get it running to get to the menu. Should the RN normally be able to boot or at least get to the menu with 1 disk or what is the minimum number it can boot with?You should normally be able to get to the memory test with the NAS diskless. A normal boot would require at least one disk of course.
Unfortunately I don't have any thoughts on a good next step, other than to measure voltage on the new supply. It is new, but maybe is having an early failure?
Although I don't have a PC that uses the same memory as the RN to allow me to check it, I swapped the two memory sticks in the RN, just exchanged their places. No workie. Then I pulled the one out of slot 2 and it booted! So I shut down and swapped to the other stick in slot 1 and no workie. To my way of thinking I have one bad SIMM. They are Kingston KHX6400D2LLK2/4G, for what it's worth.
I did a factory reset last night and this morning it's about 48% complete in its initial sync. I don't want to be too optimistic, but I've got my fingers crossed...
This makes me curious again about the other RN chassis, the one that is seemingly stone dead, won't even power up the PS. I recall pulling RAM and reseating several times but I think it's worth revisiting that chassis. The symptoms are different but who knows?
What's the current recommendation on optimal RAM amount for these machines and does RAM timing class make an appreciable difference? I expect this older style memory won't be cheap, so looking for recommendations...
Robert
Actually, if you stick with a total of 4GB of RAM via two 2GB sticks, it's dirt cheap. Unless you are running specific apps that require a ton of RAM, 4GB is more than enough. The right kind of 4Gb sticks (unbuffered, non-ECC, 2Rx8) are uncommon because PC's of that generation were mostly running a 32-bit OS, so they could only use 4GB. Server OS's were mostly 64-bit, but servers usually use buffered and/or ECC RAM.
The motherboard does not have dual-channel RAM, so there is no reason to match the two DIMMs and you gain nothing with 2 x 2GB vs. 1 x 4GB.
Thanks Sandshark, helpful as always. I won't look to expand memory capacity then. And it seems that this older memory is quite expensive but only from retailers, used sources seem plentiful and relatively cheap. I sure hope this is the reason for the failure of the sync and instability. If so, I'm even more amazed it stayed up long enough for me to back up the data. I'll be even more pleasantly surprised if it turns out to be the same issue with the other chassis that is seemingly stone dead!
After a bit of reading here it appears that the memory can be of the 1066Mhz variety, no need to limit my search to 800Mhz apparently. The CPUs were updated to the fastest possible just before I converted to OS6 a few years back.
Thank you
Robert
- Just a quick note to close the loop on this thread.
The "stone dead" RN lives on... It was bad memory on this box as well. Hard to believe but of the four memory modules in two boxes, three were bad or chose the moment I replaced the PS to go bad. I've seen bad memory prevent booting but never seen it prevent even triggering the PS on. In any case, fresh memory immediately allowed it to start.
Both RNs are now running, are fully synched, have several terabytes of data and have not been the least bit unstable.
Oddly, one of them constantly reports that its UPS has been disconnected then immediately reports it being plugged in and it's a "new" UPS. Like 50 time per day. Swapping cables, swapping UPS's, using different USB ports etc makes no difference at all. But that's another thread perhaps.
Thanks to you both for your patience, assistance and valuable input.
Cheers,
Robert
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