In my company we have a ReadsyNAS 204 in RAID5, single volume, n° 4 6TB WD RED drives.
It is used primaraly as an Acronis backup destination for a number of PC's. All has been working well for a long time, but this morning in the office we got error emails from the Acronis software, no backups were run, with "access denied" errors.
Strange thing, if I searched the RN204 from my network, it seamed to work fine, I could access the shares.... but in the Acronis software, it would not access the shares.
So, I had a look at the webGUI, no errors at all on the main LOGs page, so I went and simply rebooted the NAS..
After restart, the volume is completely missing.
Error messages: "Remove inactive volumes to use the disk. Disk #1, 2, 3, 4."
"Volume is inactive or dead".
"No volume exists (...)"
I then did a shutdown, removed and reinserted the disks (same position), and restarted... same issue.
Can anyone help me on this? Is there anything I can do to get this volume back?
Do you have a backup of your data on this NAS? It seems that the volume does not mount because of file system corruption. You can try booting the NAS to Volume Read Only and see if you can access the data. You can check this link for the steps on how to access the boot menu and select the the Volume Read Only mode.
If data is still not accessible on that mode, you can do one of the following: 1. Contact NETGEAR support for Data Recovery (https://kb.netgear.com/69/ReadyNAS-Data-Recovery-Diagnostics-Scope-of-Service) 2. You can go with 3rd party data recovery to recover your data. 3. If you already have a backup of your data, you can just recreate the volume.
I just tried to load the volume in read-only mode, but no difference whatsoever.
Luckily, the NAS was used mainly for system image backups, wich I have re-routed elseware for the time beeing. I lost a few other things, but nothing that important.
I still don't understand how file system corruption would have happened in the first place, with no warnings of any kind. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the hardware and disks themselves seem perfectly healthy.
I'm not really sure if I can trust this system going forward: are there any system/disk/hardware tests I can run to be sure everything is OK, before setting up the NAS again?
Thanks again for your time helping me on this issue.
I still don't understand how file system corruption would have happened in the first place, with no warnings of any kind.
Was there any evidence in the logs that the system restarted when the problem occured? Lost (cached) writes can definitely cause the RAID array to go out-of-sync, and that certainly can cause file system corruption.
Also, are you running the maintenance functions in the volume settings wheel? Personally I run each of them on a three month schedule. The scrub function also serves as a good diagnostic (as do the disk tests of course).
I'm about to do a full reset of the NAS and start over.
Seeing that it is used as an Acronis backup destination for about 10 office PCs and a Server, I think I'll set the drives as 4 individual volumes (no RAID).
This way, if a volume should fail, the others might still stay up. I'll also be replicating the backups to a second NAS from the backup software.
