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ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

bubdub
Follower

ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

Hello everyone,

I have an ReadyNAS Ultra 6 that has in the past recovered gracefully from a relatively large number of drive failures (RMA drives that are nearly 3 years old) and my Ultra 6 has never had a single issue until now. After the last drive failure, I shutdown the system normally and then waited for a replacement drive to arrive.

Once the replacement drive arrived I put the replacement drive into the caddy and slotted it into the system like I have always done. When the machine turned on the LCD was displaying:

Booting...
Testing Disk 2

It sat like that for about 16 hours before I started worrying that something was wrong. So I tried booting the system with the replacement drive in the system and the LCD just says:

Booting...

I have a support ticket open with the case number #21375617, and followed the instruction to go into the Boot Menu and select Skip Volume Check. Unfortunately nothing has changed and I am still getting the same as above when I do this with and without the replacement drive.

Does anyone have ideas or do I have to wait for the email support process to work its way through?

The support person mentioned that this would require escalation and proceeded to mention that my device was not in warranty and quoted me $500 ish for 3 years of premium support. Am I required to purchase additional support to get Netgear to help me with the predicament I am in?

Thanks in advance.
Message 1 of 18
mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

Power down the NAS, remove disks (label order), hook them up to an internal SATA port in your PC and check them (e.g. check SeaGate disks using SeaTools). The Ultimate Boot CD is very useful for this.

You could have another disk that is failing/dead.
Message 2 of 18
whateverittakes
Aspirant

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

@mdgm-ntgr, I have read a lot of great advices from you during the past two weeks searching for solution for a similar but more complicated problem.

 

My Ultra 6 hangs on "booting" after probably a disk failure. I contacted the Netgear support and was told to diagnose the disks. The seemingly simple task was complicated by me not labeling the disk order when I removed them ( 5X3T Seagate) from the chassis.

 

I have bought an entry level Thinkserver and installed Ubuntu on it. I was hoping that I could follow some of guides I came across to mount the drives on Ubuntu. But without the drive order, I do not think I am going anywhere.

 

Any suggestion? Thanks.

Message 3 of 18
mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

Best to keep the order of the disks the same, but it might not matter.

 

There are files on the OS partition would indicate the drive order.

Message 4 of 18
whateverittakes
Aspirant

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

Thank you for the quick reply. Hopefully the drive order does not matter with Ubuntu.

 

But in case it matters, then Ubuntu can not assemble the array and the files on the OS partition are not accessible.

 

Any other place I can figure out the drive order?

Message 5 of 18
mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

Why are you wanting to try to mount the disks outside the NAS in the first place?

What you should be checking is SMART stats or running e.g. SeaTools to check SeaGate disks to identify if there is a bad disk.

Message 6 of 18
whateverittakes
Aspirant

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

According to Netgear support, "Altering the disk arrangement will rebuild the volume. It means, that the volume will reset the RAID configuration causing the data to be deleted. "

 

Without knowing the original drive order, I am afraid that I am out of luck to do anything within the NAS.

 

I have done Seagate disk check and identified the failed disk. Replacement disk is in hand. But in the process of figuring out the next step to take.

Message 7 of 18
mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

Hi whateverittakes,

Do you have the case number for the case in which you were given that advice?

If disks are moved around while the NAS is off it shouldn't trigger a rebuild. We certainly wouldn't recommend rearranging the order of the disks though.

 

If there is a problem the volume array might fail to start, but it wouldn't be reset.



Rearranging the order of the disks while the NAS is on is what shouldn't be done. We wipe disks when they are added while the Ultra 6 is on.



If you like you could clone all the good disks onto new disks. That way if you try booting up the NAS with the good disks (or the clones of them) and something goes wrong you have another set of disks to fall back on.

Message 8 of 18
whateverittakes
Aspirant

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

Hi mdga,

 

Thank you again for the quick reply, quicker than the responses I got from the support case.

 

The support case number is 25449972.

 

I had 5 3T Seagate disks in the NAS. I had "C not protected" message on the front LED (I assumed it was due to failed disk(s) from past experiece) but did not promptly replace the disk. I simply turned it off since I would be out of town for a while. After I came back and tried to turn it on, the unit stucked on Booting and this was when I opened a support case.

 

It is a good advice to clone the disks. I'll do so before I do anything else with the original disks. I will most likely get some WD red because the Seagate desktop drives were not very reliable for me (three failed in one year).

 

So my interpretation of your suggestion is to put back the good original disks (or the cloned ones) and the replacement disk in the NSA and see if the NAS will boot. Am I correct?

Message 9 of 18
mdgm-ntgr
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

Well it's possible the NAS may boot if you try to boot it with the faulty disk removed.

 

Leaving the faulty disk in there may be what prevented the NAS from booting.

 

When you see the not protected message you should identify which disk has failed before powering off the system.

 

Yes if you put the disks back in (or the cloned ones) you could then see if it boots.

Message 10 of 18
whateverittakes
Aspirant

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

Hi mdgm,

 

Finally got all the working drives cloned. But before I put all the drives back into the NAS, instead, I put a new blank drive in there just to see if the NAS will boot. It booted and did a factory reset.

 

Now I am a little scared and wondering if the NAS will still recognize the orginal RAID dives when I power off, remove the new blank disk, insert the original disks and power back on.

 

Any advice?

Message 11 of 18
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting


@whateverittakes wrote:

 

Now I am a little scared and wondering if the NAS will still recognize the orginal RAID dives when I power off, remove the new blank disk, insert the original disks and power back on.

 


The OS is on the drives.  So the test reset you did won't have any effect on the procedure.

Message 12 of 18
whateverittakes
Aspirant

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

Hi StephenB,

 

Thank you for the quick reply.

 

I feel a little comfortable now but still somehow concerned about the fact that one of the five original RAID drives was dead, which triggered the whole exercise if you read the message history.

 

Now with the NAS factory reset, my situation is more or less like migrating existing RAID disks into a new NAS. I read somewhere on this forum that migrating to a new NAS (with same platform) requires the array to be redundent (no missing or dead disks).

 

Do you think I still have some luck since only one out of five disks failed (the RAID has not failed)?

 

Thanks,

Message 13 of 18
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting


@whateverittakes wrote:

...Now with the NAS factory reset, my situation is more or less like migrating existing RAID disks into a new NAS.


No, its not like that.  The NAS chassis has no idea if a reset was done (or if one wasn't done).  The reset triggers a factory install on whatever disks are in the NAS - that's all it does  The original OS remains intact on the old drives, and that is what is booted when you restore them.  So your situation (and your odds of success) were not changed at all by the reset.

 

BTW, people certainly have migrated damaged arrays to the same platform NAS without problems.  It's not ideal, but it does work if the remaining disks are sound.


 

Do you think I still have some luck since only one out of five disks failed (the RAID has not failed)?

 


 Your odds are good.  Sometimes a second drive will fail when you install the replacement disk.  If you followed mdgm's advice to clone the disks, then you can recover from that.  If you didn't, then you should back up of your critical data before you insert the new drive. 

 

After you are set up again, you should put a backup plan in place.

Message 14 of 18
whateverittakes
Aspirant

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

Finally got the drives all cloned. Used dd to clone the 4 healthy drives and ddrescue to clone the failing one. ddrescue managed to clone the failing dive with 0 error at the end.

 

So excited to put the five clones back in the NAS. As suggested by mdgm in one of the earlier posts that the order of the drives may not matter if the firmware is fairly new (I actually have 4.2.22). Randomly labeled the drives from 1 to 6 with the cloned failing one as disk 2. Inserted the five drives back in the cage with slot 6 empty and powered on.

 

The NAS booted!!! It started to test disk 2 and shortly after a resync was in progress. (Probably the NAS already marked drive 2 as dead, so even after successfully cloned the drive, the NAS did not see it as part of the array but rather a new drive).

 

All were good and well, thought this would be all I had to do to bring the NAS back to life. But I was wrong.

 

8 hours later, the resync was done and I saw Volume C lifesupport on the LCD screen. What the ?

 

Opened RAIDar, it showed drive 2 idle and drive 3 dead. The log says “RAID sync finished on volume C. The array is still in degraded mode, however. This can be caused by a disk sync failure or failed disks in a multi-parity disk array.” What an odd that a brand new drive out of the box failed on the first day of a job?

 

Downloaded the complete log file and shut down the NAS to avoid further mechanical deterioration.

 

A couple of hours later, thought to give it another try and powered on the NAS. Resync started immediately. RAIDar showed all drives were healthy. Checked SMART status for all the drives, especially drive 3, all seemed be in order. The shared folder was accessible. Randomly checked few files, all seemed to be good.

 

It only took 5 minutes to finish the resync this time around. Here again “RAID sync finished on volume C. The array is still in degraded mode, however. This can be caused by a disk sync failure or failed disks in a multi-parity disk array.”  Again, drive 2 idle and drive 3 dead. The shared folder was still accessible, but the previously checked good files were corrupted now.

 

Any idea what went wrong and what I should do next?

Message 15 of 18
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

You could try re-cloning, and use the boot-option menu to skip the file system check during bootup.  If that works, then pull all your data off the NAS.

 

It's hard to say what went wrong - of course if the volume is already corrupt for some reason prior to cloning, then cloning won't heal anything.  It does keep your original drives intact, so you can safely experiment on recovery.  It also eliminates any ability for RAID to recover bad data, since that depends on the the NAS getting a read error (otherwise it can't tell which block is bad).

Message 16 of 18
whateverittakes
Aspirant

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting

I was thinking about re-cloning, but not sure if I only need to re-clone disk 3 (dead per NAS) or all the disks.

 

If content of each disk changed during the sync process, I would need to re-clone all, am I right?

Message 17 of 18
StephenB
Guru

Re: ReadyNAS Ultra 6 stucking Booting


@whateverittakes wrote:

 

If content of each disk changed during the sync process, I would need to re-clone all, am I right?


Yes.

Message 18 of 18
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