I am confused on what is required for booting and remote connectivity with RAIDer?
Should my NAS boot with no drives installed? Says "Booting" and "Error: No Disks" on its front display, but I don't think it ever boots. Should it?
Should RAIDer see it and should I be able to connect as ADMIN to it?
I have four drives in my NAS in X-RAID config and it was working Thursday night when it shut down. Friday morning it won't boot. Gets to 33.7% and hangs. I can understand that a drive might fail, but I don't understand why it can't still boot and why I can't connect to it? Do all drives have to be good for the thing to boot? Seems like you (1) need to be able to connect to it in order to diagnose the problem and (2) it has to boot to connect to it and (3) it has to have all good drives to boot. What am I missing here??
Should my NAS boot with no drives installed? Says "Booting" and "Error: No Disks" on its front display, but I don't think it ever boots. Should it?
Normally the NAS boots from the disks, so it can't boot normally without them installed. The flash will partially boot, showing the "no disks" status on the LCD. It will also respond to RAIDar discovery, but you can't log in/administer the NAS unless the system can boot from the disks.
I have four drives in my NAS in X-RAID config and it was working Thursday night when it shut down. Friday morning it won't boot. Gets to 33.7% and hangs. I can understand that a drive might fail, but I don't understand why it can't still boot and why I can't connect to it? Do all drives have to be good for the thing to boot? Seems like you (1) need to be able to connect to it in order to diagnose the problem and (2) it has to boot to connect to it and (3) it has to have all good drives to boot. What am I missing here??
The NAS OS is actually stored on every disk, so in most cases it will boot even if some disks have failed.
But that is not guaranteed, it depends on exactly what failed. For instance, if disk 1 is chosen for booting, but the OS stored on that disk is corrupted, then the boot might well fail. Or if a bad disk hangs the SATA bus, the NAS can't boot until that disk is removed.
From your symptoms, it sounds like the system isn't completing a file system scan. Do you know what firmware you are running (RAIDar should be telling you this)?
When NAS is booting (before it hangs), RAIDar does not show the firmware. It is probably pretty old as I have not updated it in years. This things has pretty much been running rock solid for a long time so I have not fiddled with it.
See attached for what the RAIDar screen shows.....
