Recently, I've been having a problem getting my ReadyNAS Duo to boot up.
It started when the Duo became unresponsive, so I had to pull the plug. This has happened a few times before, but except for one time, it would always boot up afterwards (the other time, I had to bypass the file system check to get it to boot).
The Duo became unresponsive again, but after I pulled the plug and turned it on, it was stuck with the blinking blue light for hours. I tried a number of things: boot it up with just Drive 1 (making sure to turn the NAS off before inserting/removing disks and always putting the disks back in the same slot), boot it up with just Drive 2, or boot it up with both drives but try an OS reinstall. They all just gave me the blinking blue light. The RAIDar would not find the Duo either in any of these scenarios.
However, I booted the Duo up with no drives, and the RAIDar was able to find it (which lead me to believe the Duo is not the problem). Then, I ran diagnostics on the two drives: Drive 1 passed and looked fine, but Drive 2 had problems with the partition table and was unrecoverable (it now has been formatted and is empty). However, the Duo still would not boot up with just Drive 1.
What should my next step be? Try an OS reinstall with just Drive 1 (the functioning drive)? Perform a USB boot with just Drive 1? Attempt to recover the data with Drive 1, then perform a factory reset?
As you mention you have use skip volume check to boot your nas, I think maybe there's some FS errors. For your data safe, I suggest you contact support: https://my.netgear.com/myNETGEAR/support.asp
After doing a lot of activity (moving folders, renaming, rescanning DLNA folders) on the readyduo (2bay SPARC ver.) it became unresponsive, so I pulled the plug. On reboot the blue light would pulsate / blink forever, sometimes the hdd lights would come on and stay on (on other reboots they wouldn't)... in all cases frontview or my shares wouldn't appear. Left it for 24 hours to let it sort itself out but it was still 'broken' when i checked on it the next day.
Holding the power button for certain periods, I tried skipping the diskcheck, installing from usb...but still no success. After trying to mount the disks in the VMware (see forums) with no success, I managed to access and back up the data using R studio's RTOOLs (which was simple enough but it didn't find all the files ).
Before doing a complete factory reset, having backed up most of the data, i decided to try an OS reinstall first (holding the reset button pinhole at the back of the duo for 5 seconds until the hdd Leds light up)...and sure enough after a few reboots it was back up and running - with no data loss (it did however reset the admin password to "netgear1"). Glad i didn't jump to the factory default option (as this destroys your data).
So now i'm back up and running with all data available.
Naturally i'm now backing up everything fully and adjusting my backup processes to ensure this won't be such a big impact next time.
I was able to recover all of my data with a program called Linux Reader, as mentioned here: http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=35153&start=120#p381681
I'm still having trouble accessing the Duo. When I boot up the Duo with no hard drives in it, I can see it in RAIDar, but if I put a hard drive in the Duo, it doesn't show up and won't boot. Even if I try a factory reset, the Duo is stuck in the 'light blinking, fan whirring' state and never boots up. I know the disk isn't bad--I was just able to recover data from it yesterday via USB. I tried it with another disk, but no luck.
Just in case anyone has the same problem...I don't really have a solution. Seems like my Duo is defective (and out of warranty, of course).
Then, I put a different Seagate 500GB drive in the ReadyNAS and performed a factory reset. The ReadyNAS booted up, and I was able to go through the setup process. That was the only hard drive in the ReadyNAS.
After that, I put one of the 1TB drives in the ReadyNAS as a second drive (along with the 500GB drive). The ReadyNAS would not boot. I attempted to perform another factory reset, but that did not work either.
Then, I removed the 1TB drive from the ReadyNAS and attempted to boot the ReadyNAS with only the 500GB drive (which worked a few hours earlier). The ReadyNAS would not boot up.
Finally, I tried another factory reset with just the 500GB drive, and the ReadyNAS would not boot up.
