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Long time user of ReadyNAS (since I bought my first ReadyNAS NV+).
I have a RN316 with 4 x 6TB drives running X-Raid (slots 3 to 6).
Last year one of the drives started reporting errors, I ordered an identical replacement which arrived pretty quick.
I went to swap out drive 3 but then for reasons I still do not understand today, made the poor life decision to put the new drive in slot 2 and attempt to make a global spare. Unfortunately xRaid immediately grabbed the drive and tried to expand.
With in seconds I took out the new drive and then ReadyNAS kicked up errors (naturally). I started playing around with it but noted my new drive appeared to still have no data on it, and putting it back into Slot 2 does not seem to enable the expansion to restart.
As part of trying to work on the issue, I rebooted the NAS and ever since, the array has been offline.
This all happened a year ago and so between dealing with a young family, work challenges and trying to locate as much back up data of my PC's, old ReadyNAS boxes and usb drives, I get to this point.
Good news is I have a lot of the important stuff backed up, but there is still some stuff on the NAS I would love to get. I have read through other similar posts and the general solution ends up having the netgear team remote in.
Sadly I do not believe I have any such support and due to previous mentioned work challenges, cant really afford a support extension.
So before I blow away the defunct array and start from scratch, does anyone know of any tricks someone like me could try as a last ditch effort (keeping in mind when it comes to Linux, I am a big novice)?
You could still use paid netgear support - the time lag shouldn't make any difference. Per incident support is ~$100 USD - but is not enough if you need data recovery (which is likely). That is quite expensive (and charged by the hour). https://kb.netgear.com/69/ReadyNAS-Data-Recovery-Diagnostics-Scope-of-Service
If you can connect the four disks in the array to a Windows PC, you could try using ReclaiMe data recovery software. That has the benefit that you don't need to purchase it until you actually try to recover data. The software costs about $200 USD, and you might need to purchase USB adapter/docks to connect the disks up. https://www.reclaime.com/
Unfortunately there is no inexpensive option. Even if you had linux skills, data recovery would be challenging to do by hand.
FWIW, this wasn't covered by your warranty - and data recovery (assuming it is needed) wouldn't have been covered by a normal support contract.
You could still use paid netgear support - the time lag shouldn't make any difference. Per incident support is ~$100 USD - but is not enough if you need data recovery (which is likely). That is quite expensive (and charged by the hour). https://kb.netgear.com/69/ReadyNAS-Data-Recovery-Diagnostics-Scope-of-Service
If you can connect the four disks in the array to a Windows PC, you could try using ReclaiMe data recovery software. That has the benefit that you don't need to purchase it until you actually try to recover data. The software costs about $200 USD, and you might need to purchase USB adapter/docks to connect the disks up. https://www.reclaime.com/
Unfortunately there is no inexpensive option. Even if you had linux skills, data recovery would be challenging to do by hand.
FWIW, this wasn't covered by your warranty - and data recovery (assuming it is needed) wouldn't have been covered by a normal support contract.
It could be helpful for you to try to assess the condition of the array before and after it went offline. mdstat.log in the downloaded logs zip can help there. My suspicion is that once the RAID started to expand with the additional drive, the number of drives in the array was set to 5. Then when you removed the drive, you had a non-redundant array of 4 of 5 drives. So if one more drive failed, you ended up with a dead array.
If I'm wrong, and the array was still 4 drives, then starting up with just the right three might fix the problem. Even if it doesn't, it would make recovery more likely to be successful.
Meant to reply earlier but kids and life keeps me busy. I was able to check out the drives with reclaime and while I could only recover a few small files, at least I could see I had pretty much all my critical stuff Backed up.
Thank you heaps for your advice, I has replaced the dodgy drive, creates afresh array and int eh process of putting the data back on.
