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Solid red alert LED, no network link, flashing red disk light
It has the latest ReadyNAS firmware. One disk started complaining about SMART errors but continued to function (while likely reducing performance). I bought a replacement drive but the drive was bad so I put back the near-failure drive. The system was resyncing and the power failed.
It does not boot enough to turn on the ethernet link light and it does not appear on my network.
My options at this point seem to be:
- Wait 24 hours in case it is doing some very slow disk check (slowed by the near-failed drive)
- Shut it down until the new replacement drive arrives then plug in that drive and boot it
- Shut down, pull the drive with the flashing red light (same drive that reported SMART warnings) and power back up
- Attempt recovery from a USB drive
- Buy a serial adaptor for my laptop, connect to the serial port and see if any logs are echoed there
What is the best option or is there another option?
Re: Solid red alert LED, no network link, flashing red disk light
My bad. The ethernet cable was loose. When I fixed that I got a link light and found the unit at its usual IP address. (I was expecting the worst so I didn't check the basic stuff like "is it plugged in?")
And I am being really stupid because the model of disk I bought nearly matches the netgear compatibility list except that it is SAS.
Re: Solid red alert LED, no network link, flashing red disk light
If you are using XRAID or a RAID mode with redundancy, I sugggest powering down the NAS and removing the failed drive. At this point it's not helping you.
If the system boots, the array will be degraded, so you should update your backup right away (and if you don't have a backup, you should back up everything you can).
If the system doesn't boot, or if the array doesn't mount then you should contact paid support (my.netgear.com)
Re: Solid red alert LED, no network link, flashing red disk light
Thanks. I have XRAID (which means I have redundancy, right?). And, no, it does not boot. It sounds like that near-failed drive went into an absolutely failed state and the flashing red fault LED on the drive is telling me that.
Is it normal for the unit to not boot when one drive is failed? Intuitively, it sems to me like it ought to boot in a read-only mode so it can clearly tell you what state it is in. (I did not find documentation in the manual about the meaning of the fault LED on each drive. Obviously it shows a "fault" but what kind of fault and what are the next steps when the LED is flashing.)
I can see how even booting in read-only mode wears the remaining drives so if it refuses to boot it preserves those drives longer. But that also makes it impossible to back up the data which sounds like a really good idea when a drive fails.
So I have turned it off awaiting the replacement, replacement drive (it's "replacement, replacement" because I bought a replacement drive weeks ago but it turned out to be faulty).
As StevenB said, you should remove the near-failed drive. That drives is of little use to you now. I very bad disk can certainly cause the kind of problems you report. That disk is likely to spew tons of PCI errors and sector errors. The raid is out of sync as the re-sync never completed so it will cause a problem with trying to boot as the NAS will try and (and fail) to assemble the RAID upon boot.
Best thing is to not use the faulty disk at all. With X-RAID and 4 disks you have 1 disk redundancy so given that the 3 other disks are OK, then you are fine. Boot the NAS with the 3 good disks only.
As a piece of advise, it is a very bad idea to try and re-insert a known bad disk. It triggers a re-sync of the RAID and a sync is the most strenuous process for the disks. A failing disk is almost certain to suffer a quick death during that attempted re-sync.
Is it normal for the unit to not boot when one drive is failed? Intuitively, it sems to me like it ought to boot in a read-only mode so it can clearly tell you what state it is in.
It won't boot read-only unless it sees something wrong with the file system (which runs on top of RAID). That's because the goal of RAID is to allow you to continue to access (and update) your data even if you are replacing a disk.
However, a failed drive can still prevent the system from booting - it depends on exactly how it failed. Also, the system normally boots from disk 1 - so it is fairly common for the system boot to fail when disk 1 fails.
Re: Solid red alert LED, no network link, flashing red disk light
My bad. The ethernet cable was loose. When I fixed that I got a link light and found the unit at its usual IP address. (I was expecting the worst so I didn't check the basic stuff like "is it plugged in?")
And I am being really stupid because the model of disk I bought nearly matches the netgear compatibility list except that it is SAS.
