RNDU 4000 x 2 with corrupt VPD

[NoKeRse]

Hi, 

I have been a long time lurker of the Netgear forums. And have enjoyed a lot of good guides and tutorials both from NTGR employees and the community. 

During a autumn cleanup, I found my two old RNDU4000 ReadyNAS boxes. And was thinking about getting them up and running again. After a lot of searching, I have found that they most likely has been a victim of corrupt VPD-file. Able to find them in Raidar 6.5, showing fw: 4.2.31. But nothing more than IP + MAC. and a hostname of the nas. I know these are EOL. But as a storage solution they suit my needs 🙂 

Does anyone know how to fix this? @mdgm for instance? Or anyone from the NTGR team? 

I can acheive to get them up and running in tech support mode if needed.  And have taken a picture of the labels on the back. 

[mdgm]

Before jumping to conclusions, have you tried a different web browser?

Have you checked if you can connect to the NAS using SMB to view files?

[NoKeRse]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply!

Tried all of the browser I can think of. With various settings. Developer tools in Chrome states that the product number cannot be null. And all blank both on serialnumber and productnumber in Raidar 6.5 

OS reinstall, factory reset etc has been tried to no avail. 

The units has most likely been loaded with alternative OS, and when I started them a few days ago I was not able to do a factory reset nor accessing the boot menu, so in a last resort I went for a USB recovery. and after reading a little bit more I can see that may not have been my smartest move 😉 

All drives are empty and trying to access the nas-ip/shares also just shows a blank page aswell. 

Hoping for a reply from either NTGR or some of the other wizards on this community in what to do next. 🙂

[Sandshark]

With that additional information, I agree that it appears the VPD file is corrupt or missing.  Since it is encrypted, only Netgear can re-create one for you.

[NoKeRse]

Hi sandshark, 

Yup should have included the information in my first post. 

Since Im gonna upgrade them to ReadyNASOS 6 and not use ReadyCloud. Is there any way to do so from Tech Mode? By applying the update that way? for instance by using the following guide; https://dae.me/blog/1724/forcing-readynas-to-update-via-ssh-when-all-else-fails/

Any way of getting the Netgear Teams attention to the thread?

[Sandshark]

Even with OS6, the OS is going to look for the VPD.  I think it actually does it in the boot loader, which doesn't change.  Unfortunately, I don't even know which of the mods is still employed by Netgear, there seems to have been some turn-over.

[NoKeRse]

Yep it seems that there has been a turnover at Netgear . 

As how I can see it, it is strange that NTGR havent provided a tool on the webpage to regenerate the VPD-file. But then again, most of the NAS-boxes out there now is already EOL or near EOL? Havent seen so many additions to the NAS -familiy lately, or have I ignored some newsletters ? 🙂

[mdgm]

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@Sandshark wrote:

Even with OS6, the OS is going to look for the VPD.  I think it actually does it in the boot loader, which doesn't change.  Unfortunately, I don't even know which of the mods is still employed by Netgear, there seems to have been some turn-over.

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OS6 does things differently to the older units, but there is code in OS6 to use the VPD file if present.

The issue with corrupt VPD only affects units that were discontinued back in 2013 or earlier. I've never seen a problem like this with x86_64 units that shipped from the factory with OS6.

Some ARM units i.e. RN102/RN104/RN2120 have lost their serial number, but that is due to a very different issue.