ReadyNAS NV+ V2 (RND4000v2) non responsive, no boot
Hi folks,
I'm posting here as a bit of a last resort as I can't seem to find information anywhere on what to do with my problem.
So I bought this NAS from new at Christmas 2012 and it's been at the back of my mind to replace it for ages but currently it's turned itself into just another piece of electronic trash only good for a door stop so it's really trying to force my hand...
Basically I came to use it one day last week and windows reported that it couldn't connect to my network drives. Weird, I thought. So I go to the closet where the ReadyNAS lives and it's powered off. Weird, I thought. Since it's connected to a UPS I could see there had been no power failure and the other devices on the UPS are fine. I tried to turn it on but nothing happened on pressing the power button. Nothing at all. Holding it for a few seconds, pressing it again - nothing, no reaction. So I pulled it out and reconnected the power. The power button illuminates and the backlight on the LCD lights for a couple of seconds and then back to nothing.
Long story short, I pulled the drives (4x 3TB WD red in RAID5 (X-RAID2)), connected them to a Linux Ubuntu 18 live install and see that disk 4 has suffered a failure and reading the system log I saw that the NAS detected the failure and shut itself down. All data was then copied off the disks for safety. So as it stands I have my data safely backed up.
Turning back to the chassis I thought that maybe it was refusing to boot with the 4th drive in there as it had failed, it just wasn't doing a good job at telling me that. So I tried booting with just the 3 good drives and low and behold it booted up. The problem is I had the NAS on my bench partly disassembled looking for clues so I couldn't connect to it at that time. I tried several times to power the thing off once it had booted but it just wouldn't respond to my button presses so I had to, regretably, just pull the power cord. I put it back in my closet and boom, I'm back to the same deal of not booting. Plug the power cable in and just a few seconds illumination of the power button and LCD backlight. I also noticed that the yellow activity LED on the network port lights up and blinks with activity when connected to a live network although obviously it's just devices on the network trying to query it rather than the NAS itself trying to communicate.
So there it is, the NAS will not respond to button presses, the reset button also does nothing, I've had it apart and buzzed out the power switches (there are 2 physical switches in the chassis) and they work as expected so it's not bad switches to blame. I just can't get the damn thing to boot. I've tried booting with no drives and all 16 orders of the drives being inserted. Nothing seems to work, just the power LED jeering at me when I plug in the power cord.
Is there anything anyone can suggest to stop to stop this unit becoming another piece of e-waste filling up our planet's landfills?
Re: ReadyNAS NV+ V2 (RND4000v2) non responsive, no boot
Hi Stephen,
Yes, that's correct. It booted with the 3 good drives once (the first time I tired booting with only 3 drives) now it will not boot. No combination of any of the drives being inserted or removed seems to allow it to boot.
Going from the OS partition that I also backed up - the firmware is version 5.3.11
Re: ReadyNAS NV+ V2 (RND4000v2) non responsive, no boot
Thanks Stephen, I will check out the other thread.
Another theory I have is a poor solder joint underneath the processor. On the occasion I managed to get it to boot with 3 drives I had just partially reassembled the device including snapping the heatsink back into place on top of the processor. It's possible that that slight pressure temporarily helped with something.
I will reply to this thread when I have some results - should it be helpful to anyone else that might come across this.
Re: ReadyNAS NV+ V2 (RND4000v2) non responsive, no boot
So it's been a long time but after giving up on this NAS I decided to take another look at it. The long and the short is that I now have a working NAS again...
Essentially the fault is a hardware problem with the very cheap switches Netgear used for both the power and backup buttons on the unit. Each button has two switches wired in parallel on the circuit board and when one of those switches closes this registers as a button press and the machine responds as it should. Despite checking the switches being the very first thing I tried last year I didn't check thoroughly and didn't think that one of the switches could be faulty. In my case one of the switches would intermittently stick on causing the unit to think the power button was being held down permanently. It turns out that the unit's response in this instance is to do nothing at all.
I discovered all this because by sheer chance I got the unit to power up again and realised that pressing the backup button caused a system log entry but pressing the power button did not. I also could not power the device off from the power button. This lead me to think that there was some kind of fault with the associated power button circuitry (thinking I had already tested the switches previously) but when I took everything apart and tested it thoroughly I found the fault.
The solution is to remove and optionally replace (there are two switches and you can make do with only one of them) the problematic switch. De-soldering it requires a reasonable soldering iron as 3 pins of the switch go to a large ground plane so there is a lot of copper to heat up to get the solder to flow. The switches can be bought almost anywhere and cost less than $1...
So if your machine can't boot check the switches, it's pretty easy to fix and unlike me won't cost you $200+ in backup drives and hair pulling trying to recover a NAS that is not actually dead!
