ReadyNAS NV+ RND4250: keeps booting since hours - unable to connect, not found by RAIDar

[bubu63]

My ReadyNAS NV+ RND4250 worked for years (over 20...) without any problems. There are two disks in its slots. Few days ago the device stopped being accessible from my windows10 PC while daily incremental backup job was running. Since shutting down gracefully (for reboot purpose) did not work that way I forced shutting down the device by unplugging it. After plugging it in again and restarting it by pressing the power button "normally" (shortly), the device did a "quota check" (message on front display) sucessfully (100%) and then prompted the message "booting..." on the display, furthermore I got an e-mail with message text: "RAID sync started on volume C". [Thu Jun 13 09:10:41 CEST 2024]. In this state it is now since more than 7 hours: In the displays it says "booting...". The LED of the 2 installed disks light in steady green, the ACT LED is off (see photo) and the power button is blinking blue (once in a second or so). I tried to access the ReadyNAS from a Windows7 PC as well using RAIDar, without success. The device responds to PING command from windows command prompt normally, however it is not connectable by using e.g. NET USE command.

- for how long does it make sense to let the device "booting..." before force it to shutdown?

- what steps should I perform after shutdown? 

- is it e.g. worth trying to re-install the OS?

- what do you recommend further to access the data on my disk(s) again?

btw: when trying to acces the device with a browser (Frontview, https://IP-address/admin/), on a Windows7 PC the http request is answerd with just the HTML "frame" of Frontview and that's it (see screenshot).

Thank you for your help, appreciate it.

Bruno

[StephenB]

The problem could be with the disks and not the NAS.  

You could power down, and remove the disks (labeling by slot as you remove them).  Then boot up the NAS, and see if RAIDar finds it.  

If you have a Windows PC, then I also recommend testing the two disks with vendor tools (WDC Dashboard or Seagate's Seatools), and see if there are any problems.  Run the long test, not just the short one (which is really only a confidence test).

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@bubu63 wrote:

- for how long does it make sense to let the device "booting..." before force it to shutdown?

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Hard to say, since you don't have any progress information on the sync.  But I think 12 hours or so would be reasonable for 2 TB drives.

[bubu63]

thank you very much for your quick response 🙂

- is this device bootable without any disks inserted?

- if there was a problem with the disks, wouldn't their corresponding LED be blinking?

- what means the blue blinking power button (twice per second)?

Many thanks!

[Sandshark]

It's not fully bootable with no drives, but there is a bare-bones system it boots from flash that lets RAIDar see it and also can initialize new drives and install the complete OS to them.

The problem @StephenB is referring to is a problem with the drive content, not a bad drive.  The NAS boots from the drives in normal mode.

The flashing power LED just means it's booting (or powering down).  It normally takes such a short period of time, it's hardly noticeable.

[bubu63]

Thanks again. I removed firstly drive 1 and then restarted with disk 2 inserted (in its original slot #2), 

the device LCD said:

"boooting..."

"Checking root FS"

"Checking FS"

"Quata chk: {counting}%"

and after that remains saying "booting..." (endlessly as it seems). Device not found with RAIDar. Forced shutdown.

Same procedure with just disk1 inserted (in its original slot #1). Exactly same behaviour and results as above, device not found with RAIDar. Forced shutdown.

Started again with no disks inserted, display says "ERR: no disks", 4 disk LEDs are flashing in the following sequence: all 4 LED on / off / LED disk2 on / off / all 4 LED on 

Device is accessible in this state with RAIDar, however it is not via browser:

What do you suggest to do now (did not check the 2 2TB WD20EFRX SATA disks so far)?

- 

[StephenB]

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@bubu63 wrote:

What do you suggest to do now (did not check the 2 2TB WD20EFRX SATA disks so far)? 

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Try booting the NAS with the option to skip the file system check.  Pages 23-24 of the hardware manual gives the details on how to do this:

• https://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/GDC/RND2110/Duov1_NV+v1_HW_en_06Dec11.pdf

If that fails, then I suggest connecting disk 1 to a Windows PC (either with SATA or a USB adapter/dock).  Then you can use R-Linux to copy off the files.  If you don't see the files in R-Linux, then try disk 2.  R-Linux is free.

• https://www.r-studio.com/free-linux-recovery/

[bubu63]

Many thanks.

Tried booting the NAS with the option to skip the file system check, once with both disks installed, once with disk 1 and once again with disk 2 only. The behaviour was the same in all 3 scenarios: display showed "Resycing...", After 36h I decided to force shutdown again. Strange if system tries to resync with only one disk inserted, no?

I did not connect the disk(s) to a Windows PC, have no adapter/docking station yet. While I wait for this: what about booting with disk (#1 or #2 or even both?) inserted and using boot option "OS reinstall" from boot menue?

[StephenB]

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@bubu63 wrote:

I did not connect the disk(s) to a Windows PC, have no adapter/docking station yet. While I wait for this: what about booting with disk (#1 or #2 or even both?) inserted and using boot option "OS reinstall" from boot menue?

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I don't think you should do that yet.  It is unlikely to help, and (depending on what is wrong) could actually do more damage.

Once you have the adapter/dock, you can offload the data as well as testing the disks.  Then we can try other steps without concern for data safety.

[bubu63]

Dashboard S.M.A.R.T extended test reported "no problems detected" for both WD HDD 2TB. Since there seem to be no issues with drive health nor with the HW of the REadyNAS NV+, maybe the cause for the problem could be a kind of corruption in the SW, e.g. file system, boot sequence, firmware,...What do you suggest to check/repair this? The aim is of course to get the system up and running again, since all the HW components seem to be still healthy.

[StephenB]

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@bubu63 wrote:

...What do you suggest to check/repair this? The aim is of course to get the system up and running again, since all the HW components seem to be still healthy.

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If you know the config, then I'd offload the data using R-Linux for Windows, and then do a factory default on the NAS and reconfigure it.  Then copy the data back.  (Obviously if you have a backup, then there's no need for R-Linux).

That will give you a completely clean system, with no worries that a file system repair might have missed something.

The 4.1.x NAS use hardware acceleration and put the RAID parity on one disk (technically RAID-4, but Netgear called it RAID-5).  That parity disk isn't formatted the same way as the others.  Although you are using RAID-1, the formatting on the mirror is still a bit different from the primary disk.  As a result, R-Linux will only find the data volume on one of the two disks.  Normally that is the first one, but there are some cases where the mirror ends up being the first disk.

[bubu63]

do I have to format the 2x WD 2TB HDD or is factory reset enough, with the 2 disks inserted?

[StephenB]

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@bubu63 wrote:

do I have to format the 2x WD 2TB HDD or is factory reset enough, with the 2 disks inserted?

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The factory default from the boot menu will reformat them.

FWIW, the factory default and OS reinstall procedures can only be done with disks installed.

[bubu63]

Did a scan of disk#2 with R-Linux, showing this result:

According to the support site of R-Linux a partition in red is "A recognized partition. Only boot records are found for this partition". Do I got that right: there are no file entries in this partition, so all files there are lost for me?

[StephenB]

What do you see when you scan disk 1?