RN104 not booting after 6.4.0 and other fun issues
I realise there's a million threads on this already, but my issues appear to be unique so I thought I'd share and hopefully find a fix. Like many others here, my RN104 is having a lot of trouble after the FW 6.4.0 upgrade, and appears to be stuck on "Booting..." when powered on. The power button is blinking, and the ACT light blinks for approximately 10-15 mins after power up before going solid blue and showing no further activity. The power button continues blinking.
I left the ReadyNAS on for about four hours today after I left for work this morning, and it still didn't get past "Booting..."
However, the ReadyNAS does appear in RAIDar for a short time after power up, while the ACT light is blinking. During this time, the data volume is still accessible (but very slow, possibly because the "quota check" talked about in the release notes and on the forums is being performed?). After the ACT light goes solid, it disappears from RAIDar and I can no longer access the data.
This is the full timeline of my nightmare.
1) Upgraded yesterday afternoon to FW 6.4.0 via the web interface. It appeared to install and boot fine.
2) Noticed before I went to bed that night that the ReadyNAS had locked up and become inaccessible. I could not access the data volume or the admin page. It did not respond when I pressed the power button.
3) I pulled the power cord, reconnected it and powered up the ReadyNAS again. This is when it started becoming stuck on "Booting..." and displayed the symptoms I mentioned earlier.
5) The USB FW install was successful, but it still did not get past "Booting..." after it reset. I left it like that and went to work.
6) I returned four hours later for lunch and it was still on "Booting...". I power cycled the ReadyNAS again and once again left it.
7) I came back another four hours later. Still on "Booting...".
😎 I tried an OS Reinstall from the boot menu, following these instructions. It still didn't work.
9) I tried the USB recovery one more time. It still didn't work and the ReadyNAS is still stuck on "Booting..."
My RN104 has 4 x 4TB Seagate HDDs in Flex-RAID, with about 9TB of data. It's my home media server. Nothing on it is irreplacable but it would take weeks to recover everything I had, a process I am incredibly not keen on.
For the love of God, Netgear, please fix this. Either find a way that we can downgrade safely to a working firmware, or release a new one that doesn't have these bugs. I would really like to have access to my media collection again...
Re: RN104 not booting after 6.4.0 and other fun issues
Final (hopefully) update on this.
I was contacted by somebody from Netgear offering free tech support on this issue. Unfortunately, they were unable to resolve it remotely, so it was escalated to the Level 2 engineers.
It had been over a month by this point and I was sick of not being able to use the NAS fully, so I went and got myself a couple of 6TB HDDs, backed up the data and performed a factory reset of the RN104.
Everything appears to be okay now. It's performing a data resync as I type this and everything is accessible again.
Still not happy about Netgear releasing such a horribly broken update, but at least they came through with the support. Even if I did get impatient with them. Heh.
