ReadyNAS Duo fails to boot because of bad drive

[tfandango]

Hello-

I believe I've isolated the issue with my ReadyNAS. It did what a lot of other people are reporting here, started up with a rapidly blinking power button and was otherwise unresponsive after that, no web admin, no Raidar, no working power buttons etc.

I removed both drives and it started and immediately responded to Raidar (lights indicated no disks obviously). So I ran the memory test and that came back good. So I'm assuming the NAS itself is good.

I took the disks and plugged them into my Windows computer and ran the seagate tools on them. One passed, the other hanged when running the short generic test and passed immediately on the long generic test (which should have taken a long time if I understand the docs correctly).

So I believe I have one bad disk (disk slot 1) and one good disk (slot 2). What are the next steps for me? I'm assuming I can get another 1TB drive and plug it in and it should resync? I'm nervous because I really want to keep the data on this last good drive.

Also, I'm concerned at the way the NAS behaved in this scenario. The point of the thing is to be redundant, but when one drive failed the entire thing becomes a brick and requires pulling the pieces out and figuring out what went wrong. I would have preferred it saying, "disk 1 failed, put in a new disk" 🙂

Thanks a ton, this forum was great help in figuring this out.

[mdgm-ntgr]

If the NAS is left running all the time, it should detect a bad disk gracefully, however as disks can and do fail at any time, occasionally it's possible this may not happen. I would get a replacement disk, then boot the NAS with just disk 2 installed. If it boots fine then add the new disk to slot 1 while the NAS is on.

[tfandango]

Thanks, I'll try it. Should I always keep disks in the same slot, in this case, put the good disk back in slot 2? Or does that matter at all?

[mdgm-ntgr]

Keep disks in the same slot wherever possible. Particularly if you have a non-redundant array this is very important.

[tfandango]

By the way, everything worked great. Thanks a lot for your help. The failed seagate drive was replaced under warranty for free, and the readynas synced the new disk just fine. I've also added a serious UPS to the mix for extra protection. Thanks again.