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My RN10200 2-bay 2TB running OS 6.4.7 (iirc!) stopped being available on the network over night. When turning it on today, it won't show up as a network drive, nor can RAIDar detect it.
The drives make a regular tick ............ tick .............. tick .............. and there is no network activity to be seen on the LAN port LEDs (green is on, yellow is not). From what I can gather, the NAS isn't booting properly and caught in some kind of loop. All data on the NAS is not backed up, so whatever needs to be done, keeping the data partition intact is paramount.
Which tests can be performed, what can be done to get out of the boot-loop and kick the OS back into operation?
A ticking is generally the drives themselves unless it's a fan, which generally won't prevent booting. One bad drive can cause the NAS to not boot at all. The first thing to do is remove both drives, labeling their position, and power on. See if it powers on and RAIDar reports "No Disks". If it does, that's a good sign that the NAS hardware is OK. If it doesn't, it's the chassis or power supply. Don't panic, though, you should be able to put the drives in a replacement ReadyNAS and recover the data (assuming the hardware failure didn't result in corrupt data).
If you have a PC with which to run the drive vendor's tools (SeaTools, Data Lifeguard), you should do that to see if one drive is bad. The PC won't recognize the drive format, but the tool should be able to diagnose the drive.
If one is bad, return the other to the chassis (with power off) and power on. Hopefully, the data on that one is intact and you will be OK. Make a backup, then replace the failed drive.
If neither shows up as bad, you can try one drive and then the other alone. Matybe the data is corrupt on just one (thugh that rarely results in your symptom). If you have no way to test the drives, you can just go ahead with this step.
If both are bad, then something bad happened to harm them. There is a slim chance you can make a clone of one and see if you can recover data from it.
If vendor's tools say the drives are OK but neither will boot, a failing power supply could power the NAS without drives but not with, so that's still a possibility (though not a good one). More llikely you are in a data recovery situation. If you find yourself there, come back for more assistance. We'll hope for now that's not the case.
BTW your assumption that you could use USB or eSATA to access your data is false. Those ports are for attching other drives, not for access via a computer. Likewise, your assumption that a redundant RAID will protect your data is flawed. It's better than nothing, but hardware failures can occur that take the drives with it. Then there are theft, fire, flood, etc. to contend with as well.
Please forgive my ignorance, but I can't check the exact OS version atm and yes, I had been relying on the mirrored setup to be a backup on its own. Off the top of my head I assumed all the time, if things go really bad, all data would be still accessible with one of the drives accessed via an external SATA-USB adaptor. Your question clearly implies it isn't best practice at all, maybe that external access wouldn't work out anyway, and my so far rather bad user experience with this product should have let me suspect that before. Once this issue is solved, a data backup will take place immediately.
Nothing unusual has happened the other day. I copied a file from the NAS, then after a while turned it off. Most of the times I turn it off, I mix up the right power button sequence to really shut the NAS down, but I take (and took) it from the NAS still being on, to take another attempt at it, which so far has proven to be no problem.
A ticking is generally the drives themselves unless it's a fan, which generally won't prevent booting. One bad drive can cause the NAS to not boot at all. The first thing to do is remove both drives, labeling their position, and power on. See if it powers on and RAIDar reports "No Disks". If it does, that's a good sign that the NAS hardware is OK. If it doesn't, it's the chassis or power supply. Don't panic, though, you should be able to put the drives in a replacement ReadyNAS and recover the data (assuming the hardware failure didn't result in corrupt data).
If you have a PC with which to run the drive vendor's tools (SeaTools, Data Lifeguard), you should do that to see if one drive is bad. The PC won't recognize the drive format, but the tool should be able to diagnose the drive.
If one is bad, return the other to the chassis (with power off) and power on. Hopefully, the data on that one is intact and you will be OK. Make a backup, then replace the failed drive.
If neither shows up as bad, you can try one drive and then the other alone. Matybe the data is corrupt on just one (thugh that rarely results in your symptom). If you have no way to test the drives, you can just go ahead with this step.
If both are bad, then something bad happened to harm them. There is a slim chance you can make a clone of one and see if you can recover data from it.
If vendor's tools say the drives are OK but neither will boot, a failing power supply could power the NAS without drives but not with, so that's still a possibility (though not a good one). More llikely you are in a data recovery situation. If you find yourself there, come back for more assistance. We'll hope for now that's not the case.
BTW your assumption that you could use USB or eSATA to access your data is false. Those ports are for attching other drives, not for access via a computer. Likewise, your assumption that a redundant RAID will protect your data is flawed. It's better than nothing, but hardware failures can occur that take the drives with it. Then there are theft, fire, flood, etc. to contend with as well.
