RN214, bought in May 2018 and registered with Netgear. 4 new 6TB WD RED drives bought in May.
Worked fine until today - when all my shares are invisible. No system updates since yesterday, and no other users except me. All connected to Nighthawk Router.
ReClaiMe can see my lost files (I tried that) and can play the audit, but will charge $199 for recovery. Not acceptable for data I already own, and on drives that the NAS tells me are healthy and with data on them. What happened since yesterday??
FYI - Approx 12GB of not-for-profit recording studio data currently inaccessible (sluicegatestudio is a nfp org).
Netgear - what is the reason for this? will you cover the $199? I think you should. Or provide a solution.
Formal response from Netgear please.
Model: RN21400|ReadyNAS 214 Series 4- Bay (Diskless)
I'm not Netgear, but I suggest that you post the firmware version you are running on the NAS.
Also, the all my shares are invisible comment could use some clarification. Do you mean that the shares aren't shown in the admin Web UI? Or that you aren't seeing them in File Manager or Finder?
All shares have disapeared in Web UI, Drives reporting healthy, with data capacity showing as being appropriately used. I can see *some* of them in WIndows explorer (some of the mapped drives - but not all).
Am Exporting the drives and doing data recovery, which is arduous, but seems to be fine - all data is there and drives are healthy using WD diagnostics etc.
Model: RN21400|ReadyNAS 214 Series 4-Bay (Diskless)
Have you tried accessing the NAS data volume with file explorer/finder? You can do that with NAS admin credentials. Once done, check to see if the missing shares are showing up there. Note that you can only use one windows credential from a PC at at time. There is a trick though- if you are mapping the drives using the NAS host name, then you can map them using the IP address with admin credentials (or vice versa).
Also, is the system have an indication of a full root volume?
thanks for getting back. no indication of any root volume issues - no error messages, no warnings, nothing in the logs etc. where would a root volume error be reported?
i'm unable to map to shares (that I was previously mapped to in Windows) using admin rights - windows reports "no such volume" or similar error if I try this. Odd is I can still see some mapped shares, but not others that were previously mapped.
either way, none of this explains why all shares invisible in the Web UI - so I can't change settings/priviledges etc, move data or run backup jobs from the Web Interface - as shares "no longer exist".
Data recovery (Active LiveCD to the rescue) is progressing and nothing is lost. However, what caused this? given me a 2day system outage, and has shaken confidence in this setup. Yes I know no 'backup' is 100% relied upon, but this is a bit mad...
thanks for your help - appreciate it.
Model: RN21400|ReadyNAS 214 Series 4-Bay (Diskless)
" Yes I know no 'backup' is 100% relied upon, but this is a bit mad... "
But this is no backup, if this is your only copy of the data - this is your data, not your backup. Always keep more than one copy of your data, preferably in different physical location (if possible). What if someone stole the NAS? What if there's a fire? Thunder strike frying the device/disks? Someone knocks over a bookshelf that crushes the NAS?
Anyways, from the sounds of it your data is not lost and there's just some config that got corrupted on the NAS - did you reach out to Netgear support? It may not be free if your NAS is >90 days old but that's the price you pay for not having a backup of crucial data.
There's also a === df -i === section that gives inode usage for ext volumes. Check that also, since the arm-based OS-6 ReadyNAS like the RN214 use the ext file system for the root volume. (x86 OS-6 ReadyNAS use btrfs for the root volume).
Normally the root volume is around 25% full (or less).
either way, none of this explains why all shares invisible in the Web UI - so I can't change settings/priviledges etc, move data or run backup jobs from the Web Interface - as shares "no longer exist".
It does sound like some configuration files got garbled on the NAS. Often that is a side-effect of a full root volume, but I have seen some other posts where that doesn't seem to be the cause. Paid netgear support can diagnose/repair it remotely.
On the mapped drives - if you use XRAID, then you can map the full data volume to a drive letter using CMD on the PC:
net use * /delete
net use t: \\nas-ip-address\data /user:admin nas-admin-password
will map the data volume to drive letter T: (when you use the real IP address and NAS admin password of course). The first command will dismount any other mapped drives. You do need to be careful on the typing (both slash direction and spaces).
Once you've done that, you can see all the share folders in the root of T (along with home, and some hidden folders like .apps). Often when a share goes missing, the folder (and contents) are still intact. If that's the case, there are some simple ways to recover the share configuration. For instance, if the share was called "share" you could
rename the share folder in t: to "tempshare"
create a new share called "share" in the web ui.
rename the share folder in t: to "xshare"
rename "tempshare" to "share"
Getting rid of the empty xshare folder would require use of ssh - shares look like folders, but they actually are btrfs subvolumes. You won't be able to delete them from Windows (though renaming them works).
thanks for the help. I looked at the logs, nothing whacky and root volume is around 20%. anyway, we're 80% through rebuilding the array using data recovery - that's working fine. To be clear, this is not the only copy of the data we have, but it is the only version that has all of the projects in one place, and is our offsite DR vault. Freaks us out when it goes awry.
As we're nearly done with recovery, i'll leave this investigation here and put it down to weirdness. we'll look into a second-line back-up of the vault, and in the interim we'll watch this NAS (we have others) like a hawk.
thanks for your help - appreciate it. nice to know there's some willing expertise out there!
Model: RN21400|ReadyNAS 214 Series 4-Bay (Diskless)
Just spotted something that might be relevant. I just tried to set up a backup job, using the NAS to connect to a share on a PC using Windows Archive bit. done this plenty of times before.
except this time, NAS crashes, and I get "SMB_tcon+184" on the NAS LCD screen...
and I lose access to my rebuilt shares...
any ideas?
Model: RN21400|ReadyNAS 214 Series 4-Bay (Diskless)
no power failure - I was on the PC at the time of the first fail on Tuesday, and I was on this morning - would have noticed. we have a surge protector across the whole system as well.
it's JBOD - we run weekly mirror backups of the disks and export as when necessary to expand capacity. enables us to recover / offsite archive complete projects without moving multiple disks each time.
on tueday i lost disks 3 & 4 simultaenously, then 2 then 1 a bit later. this morning, I lost disk 3 (disappered from Web UI), but can still access the shares via windows.
Model: RN21400|ReadyNAS 214 Series 4-Bay (Diskless)
we have a surge protector across the whole system as well.
Perhaps consider a UPS that the NAS can monitor over USB. jbod can't get out of sync (since there is no RAID), but it still is best to do clean shutdowns when the power fails.
on tueday i lost disks 3 & 4 simultaenously, then 2 then 1 a bit later. this morning, I lost disk 3 (disappered from Web UI), but can still access the shares via windows.
This is sounding like it might be a chassis problem. Volumes shouldn't just disappear, especially if the disks are healthy. You could contact paid support, and ask for an RMA. Though it is odd that you aren't seeing I/O errors in kernel.log.
Another path (more painful) would be to set the NAS up from scratch and restore all the data. That would rule out any chance that there is something amiss with the OS partition. Then if the problem recurs, you'd have a stronger case that it's hardware.
If I export the disks, and then do reset can I reimport the disks? Will that work?
I did mean a factory reset.
You can't import them all, since you need to format at least the main disk. And you should rebuild whatever disk is hosting md126, as there were some issues dtected there.
This is definitely a "nuclear" option, the idea was just that ruling out any possibility of file system corruption would make it easier to execute the RMA. So you could just start an RMA process, and see if there is pushback before you go down this path.
I’ve got a full backup of the thing now - had to create one this week due to this problem in the first place. So factory reset whilst a hassle wouldn’t be bad data wise.
I’ll give it a go. Thanks v much
Model: RN21400|ReadyNAS 214 Series 4-Bay (Diskless)
