Revert back from Wheezy to original firmware on Pro RNDP6000

[Marowista]

Recently I bought a ReadyNAS Pro RNDP6000 v1. Because I was unsatisfied with the possibilities of Debian 4, I migrated to Debian Wheezy.

I did this fully aware of breaking the warranty. Using a converter to get a VGA output from the motherboard, I installed Debian 7 using a USB stick. I also upgraded the CPU to an old quad core (Q6600) i still had from an old computer. The Debian installation works just fine and I didn't even lose my RAID setup (which I noticed, does get reset when resetting/reinstalling with the original firmware).

All seemed to work just fine, until I recently discovered I was getting a lot of sky2 network driver errors in my kernel logs:

[Thu Oct 17 20:32:51 2013] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth1: rx error, status 0x7ffc0001 length 812
[Thu Oct 17 20:32:56 2013] net_ratelimit: 85 callbacks suppressed
[Thu Oct 17 20:32:56 2013] sky2 0000:02:00.0: error interrupt status=0x40000008
[Thu Oct 17 20:32:56 2013] sky2 0000:02:00.0: error interrupt status=0x8
[Thu Oct 17 20:32:56 2013] sky2 0000:02:00.0: error interrupt status=0x40000008
[Thu Oct 17 20:32:56 2013] sky2 0000:02:00.0: error interrupt status=0x8
[Thu Oct 17 20:32:56 2013] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth1: rx error, status 0x7ffc0001 length 868
[Thu Oct 17 20:32:56 2013] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth1: rx error, status 0x7ffc0001 length 556
[Thu Oct 17 20:32:56 2013] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth1: rx error, status 0x7ffc0001 length 940
[Thu Oct 17 20:32:56 2013] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth1: rx error, status 0x7ffc0001 length 620
[Thu Oct 17 20:32:56 2013] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth1: rx error, status 0x7ffc0001 length 1132
[Thu Oct 17 20:32:56 2013] sky2 0000:02:00.0: eth1: rx error, status 0x7ffc0001 length 300

This caused the network speeds to become unstable. I would like to return to the original firmware, but unfortunately I had too much confidence in myself to backups of the original firmware and boot partition.

I don't believe the downloadable firmware helps me with this problem: First of all, it's encoded in an image and don't know how to extract it. This firmware would probably contain the content of /dev/md0, the Debian part. I however also need the content of /dev/sde1, the /boot mount of this NAS.

Basically, I was too stupid to prepare myself for this and create backups forehand. Is there any way I can revert back to the original software state of this device? I have direct VGA/keyboard access to the NAS, but I would like a image of the /dev/md0 and /dev/sde1 partitions from someone else with this device, preferably created using the tool dd. I don't know if this is legal (of course, I can prove I own this NAS, so perhaps sending it to me in a private message would be legal), but either way, any suggestions are welcome!

[mdgm-ntgr]

A USB Boot Recovery would load the stock firmware back onto the internal flash: http://home.bott.ca/webserver/?p=166

Though unsupported you can run ReadyNAS OS 6 on the Pro. This uses Wheezy. You might also wish to consider this.

[Marowista]

Thanks a lot! I will recover and use Wheezy through ReadyNAS OS 6. I am now making a backup of the data and report back once I've finished trying to recover.

[Marowista]

I've applied the USB recovery and after a OS Reinstall and Factory Defaults I got it working in it's original mode...kind of.

I can set up the device now using Raidar and when I create an RAID array I can access the data I place on it. However, the Frontview interface doesn't seem to be working properly: I can login to the normal and admin interface using the default username/pass, but it won't show me any content.

I do see the frontview images but the menu's and everything is gone. I've tried the USB recovery again as well as the reinstall/factory defaults but this doesn't work. Now I've tried setting the device up in Tech Support but I don't know the telnet password to check it.

Any suggestions?

[Marowista]

Thanks to mdgm's help I was able to fix it! 🙂

[ruffy91]

What did you do to recover from this situation?
As I have the same problem since installing Ubuntu Server (/boot on internal flash) and now recovering via usb recovery.
I read that the problem with the empty frontview is a problem with the EEPROM contents that I apparently have deleted...

Edit: I have a ReadyNAS Ultra 2, but I think the recovery process should be the same.

[mdgm-ntgr]

ruffy91 check your email.

[ruffy91]

Thank you mdgm for your help. 😄 Works a treat now.