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I have a ReadyNAS NV+ v1 that will not boot. After power-up, it goes into checking quotas, then it displays 'Booting...' and never completes. After that, it will not respond to the power button. I believe it got into this state after I attempted Download All Logs from Frontview.
My NAS contains 4 2-TB data drives. Thinking that maybe I had a bad drive, I tried powering off, removing each drive in turn and powering up, but with the same result: it won't boot. I then removed all 4 data drives and inserted a scratch drive, and it booted successfully. It will boot no matter which position the scratch drive is installed in.
Then I tried Download All Logs with the scratch drive inserted, and FrontView stopped responding, and the NAS would not reboot, again getting hung at 'Booting...'.
At this point, I tried a different scratch drive, and it booted again successfully.
I reinstalled the firmware using the reset switch. It still booted fine with the scratch drive. I Cleared the logs using Frontview, and it still booted with the scratch drive. I reinstalled my 4 data drives, and it would not boot.
Any suggestions? Is it likely that the problem is in the bare NAS box itself, or is it on one or more of the drives, and if that's the case, is my data toast? It's possible I could obtain another bare NV+ box and plug my drives into it to try to get the data off, if that is a viable option. I don't know how the ReadyNAS OS architecture works, nor whether it depends on the data drives in order to boot, so I'm likely missing something (a lot) here.
I have no backup -- foolish, I know. The data is not mission-critical, but it would save some major inconvenience if we could recover it. The NAS was purchased in 2009, so it is long out of Netgear support.
It sounds like a full OS partition. The system ZIPs the logs to download together in that partition. If the zipping process filled the partition, that would be the result. Did you have SSH enabled? If so, can you SSH in and see if you have something really big in the OS partition? If SSH is not enabled, you may be able to do the same via FTP into the unit when it is in support mode, but I'm unsure of the details on how to do that on an old NV+.
It's a bit odd, though, that you would have a simlar problem with just a new drive installed. Nothing should have been too big when you zipped the logs.
Thanks for your reply. That makes sense. I don't know whether SSH is enabled, but I will try it. I don't know how to enter support mode; I've seen it mentioned here on the forum, and have been leery of trying it, but it sounds like I may be at the point where I should.
The scratch drive I installed that allowed successful boot wasn't new, but had previously been in the NAS (a couple years ago) as part of a 4x1TB volume, but I would have thought it would have been seen as having free space (?). Maybe it would need to have been formatted though. The display showed 0/0MB free.
I had no luck trying to SSH to the IP address, neither during the quota check nor once it got to the 'Booting...' state. I am now reading up on how to boot into Tech Support mode to see if I can evaluate whether it's got a full OS partition.
I haven't tried that. I'm assuming that the check completes successfully, but I don't know for sure. I've seen the % complete climb into the 90s, and by the next time I look, the display no longer says Quota Check, just "Booting...".
Today when I tried booting, it started a Disk 1 sync, which it has not done since this problem began. It's been running about 3 hours so far. I'm going to let that go overnight, and if that doesn't get me to a new state, I'll try booting without a quota check.
Update: I aborted the Disk 1 sync after it ran for about 50 hours. The box wouldn't respond to a press of the power button, though when I held it down for about 10-15 seconds, the fan and all drive and power lights went off, but the LCD display and backlight remained on.
I've now booted by skipping the volume check. The display went through these steps so far:
1: Booting...
2: Resynching volume
3: Booting... Disk 4 sync
This is where it sits right now, with the 4 drive lights on solid, Act light flashing rapidly, and blue power light flashing slowly.
I'm not too optimistic, but I guess I will let this go for 24 hours or so...
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Thank you so much! I had little hope of getting this box to boot again and accessing my data. You really made my day. Time for me to adopt a real backup strategy.
