Readynas Pro 6 won't boot

[tb303]

Hi,

Since years I am a happy ReadyNas Pro 6 owner.

Half a year ago I upgraded the ReadyNas Pro 6 to Readynas OS6. It worked just fine and fast!

A month ago I stared to have some disk problems on disk 1 which I negledted a little.

A few days ago I switched the readynas off to take ot to the office and have a look at the disk that was repporting errors and when I took the readynas to my office and powered it on again, it wouldn't boot and It also wouldn't boot into boot menu.

What have I already done?

1. I have checked the PSU. It working 100% 

2. I have checked memory. 100%

3. I have connected a VGA adapter. The hardware seems to be working fine.

4. I have tried to get it into boot menu. Fails.

I suspect the bootflash has been wiped.

I have tried serveral readynas USB recovery disks but these won't boot either.

If I boot from a Windows 10 USB stick, installation of Windows seems to be no problem.

Can anybody give me detailed instructions how to debug and how to get the bootloader written to flash again?

I have some linux experience.

KInd regards,

Michel

[tb303 · Accepted solution]

Thanks to the great help of mdgm my Readynas Pro 6 is running the lastest Readynas OS6 again!

I ended up using dd on a debian life boot disk to dd flash the image mdgm supplied to me back to the internal flash.

After that I mounted the partition and copied the supplied serial number file to the internal flash.

Mdgm, thanks for you great support!

Kind regards,

Michel

[tb303]

A few screenshots of the bios:

[mdgm-ntgr]

If USB Boot Recovery works the system should automatically power off when done.

You still can't get into the boot menu after doing USB Boot Recovery?

[tb303]

I have tried all available USB recovery images. They won't work on my machine.

What I see on the console is:

And then simply nothing happens 😞

I have booted from a Debian live USB and noticed that the MBR on the internal 128MB USB memory is corrupt.

What I need is a RAW image of the internal 128MB USB so I can restore it inclusing the MBR.

Is someone willing and able to make a dd image of the internal flash?

All you need to safely do that is ssh root access to your Readynas Pro 6.

If you ssh into your readynas, first figure out the path to one of your shares.

Let's say you cd to your share at:

/data/myshare

Then enter the following command:

fdisk -l | grep 128

This will show you a 128MB USB device. Most probably /dev/sda

Then enter:

dd if=/dev/sda of=/data/myshare/usb.img bs=512k conv=noerror,sync

This will make a RAW image of your internal flash and store it on your share.

If you could zip that and send this to me somehow, I would be eternally thankfull!

Cheers,

Michel

[Sandshark]

But wouldn't that also include the serial number, efffectively cloning my Pro to yours for ReadyCloud and such?

[tb303]

I'm not 100% sure, but it would be quit silly if Netgear would have stored it on flash.

I presume it is stored in the hardware (bios or eeprom or something like that).

[StephenB]

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@Sandshark wrote:

But wouldn't that also include the serial number, efffectively cloning my Pro to yours for ReadyCloud and such?

---

Maybe best to wait for mdgm or another Netgear person on this.

[mdgm-ntgr]

We store the serial number and other EEPROM data on the internal flash on legacy x86 and ARM ReadyNAS. I have replied to your PM.

Also USB Boot Recovery formats the USB key. If I recall correctly it puts a new MBR on it, so it's a bit surprising it didn't work.

[tb303 · Accepted solution]

Thanks to the great help of mdgm my Readynas Pro 6 is running the lastest Readynas OS6 again!

I ended up using dd on a debian life boot disk to dd flash the image mdgm supplied to me back to the internal flash.

After that I mounted the partition and copied the supplied serial number file to the internal flash.

Mdgm, thanks for you great support!

Kind regards,

Michel

[mdgm-ntgr]

Great!

Glad that fixed it.