I am chasing down some issues with two of three RNDP600U units I upgraded to 6.10.10 from 4.x that were all working fine at 6.x.95 and then suddenly became bricks when they upgrade 6.10.10 and rebooted.
I was wondering if anyone could help me try to get these units to running again.
All three units were purchased in 2014 and ran just fine until about a month ago, when one by one the power supplies all failed.
After chasing down power supplies, I got them all running again.
I read online in this forum, that they could be upgraded to OS 6.x and they would support bigger drives and better features, similar to my 316 unit. I backed up all my data on each unit one by one, pre-upgrade and then performed the updates.
All three units came up, upgraded fine and installed new volumes. A few hours later, they all warned of a critical OS update to 6.10.10, so I let them update. Afterwards, they ran fine until the next reboot and crashed to a ReadyNas screen on the front cover, with the green backup button light on.
I read in some posts here that this may be an issue with a missing or corrupt VPD file. I have spent hours trying to get the units to show me the boot menu, using the reset button, with no success.
I did configure all of the units to allow access ssh access, prior to this issue, but RAIDar does not show the units running on the network.
The one unit that upgraded fine and is still working, has 4x12tb drives with all of my photos and videos of a lifetime. I am concerned that I'll loose that unit the same way.
The two units that won't boot were wiped clean by the upgrade and I am hoping to simply to bring them back online reliably again.
I am experienced with Linux, but I was unable to find and mount the partition where the VPD file is stored on the working unit, to back it up as a precaution, despite following posted instruction in this forum. I could use some guidance on how to back up the VPD file on the working unit and additional assistance on getting the other two a new VPD file and working again.
If you upgraded to OS6 prior to 6.10.x, then you likely missed the warning to upgrade memory to at least 2GB. As of 6.10.x, many with the stock 1GB have had issues. All Intel based native OS6 units ship with at least 2GB.
I've seen that post on how to backup the VPD and it did not gain me access to the VPD file for backing up on a 316 unit or RNDP600U unit.
All of my units have 2 or 4gb of ram, so that's not my issue and they had the 2 or more gigs prior to the upgrade.
I think this VPD issue occurs on units that reuse the existing pre OS6 disks. This is the only thing different about the one unit that worked successfully. It unit received 4 brand new 12tb drives.The two that failed were using the existing 3 or 4tb drives, used with OS 4, pre-upgrade. I upgraded them using one new 4tb drive and after the upgrade, put the sic discs back in and let it reformat and reinstall either factory OS6. Both were stable until the upgrade to 6.10.10. A single reboot after that bricks them.
Thanks, but this doesn't get me any closer to a solution.
Directions state to mount the next partition after your last disk. My unit has 4 disks. I have tried every combination I could come up with to mount the fifth partition or disk.
All I get is a an error: mount: special device /dev/sde does not exist
The follow is a list of the /dev crw-rw---- 1 root disk 10, 234 Apr 11 10:13 btrfs-control drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 160 Apr 11 10:13 disk brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 0 Apr 11 10:13 loop0 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 1 Apr 11 10:13 loop1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 2 Apr 11 10:13 loop2 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 3 Apr 11 10:13 loop3 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 4 Apr 11 10:13 loop4 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 5 Apr 11 10:13 loop5 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 6 Apr 11 10:13 loop6 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 7, 7 Apr 11 10:13 loop7 crw-rw---- 1 root disk 10, 237 Apr 11 10:13 loop-control brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 0 Apr 11 10:13 md0 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 1 Apr 11 10:13 md1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 9, 127 Apr 11 10:13 md127 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 0 Apr 11 10:13 sda brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 1 Apr 11 10:13 sda1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 2 Apr 11 10:13 sda2 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 3 Apr 11 10:13 sda3 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 16 Apr 11 10:13 sdb brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 17 Apr 11 10:13 sdb1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 18 Apr 11 10:13 sdb2 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 19 Apr 11 10:13 sdb3 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 32 Apr 11 10:13 sdc brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 33 Apr 11 10:13 sdc1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 34 Apr 11 10:13 sdc2 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 35 Apr 11 10:13 sdc3 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 48 Apr 11 10:13 sdd brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 49 Apr 11 10:13 sdd1 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 50 Apr 11 10:13 sdd2 brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 51 Apr 11 10:13 sdd3 crw-rw---- 1 root disk 21, 0 Apr 11 10:13 sg0 crw-rw---- 1 root disk 21, 1 Apr 11 10:13 sg1 crw-rw---- 1 root disk 21, 2 Apr 11 10:13 sg2 crw-rw---- 1 root disk 21, 3 Apr 11 10:13 sg3
Directions state to mount the next partition after your last disk. My unit has 4 disks. I have tried every combination I could come up with to mount the fifth partition or disk.
All I get is a an error: mount: special device /dev/sde does not exist
Are you doing this in tech support mode? Normal SSH won't work.
I'm not sure what sg? is, but none of them are mountable. All return the same error. There seems to be one sg? for each physical disk I have installed. Yes, this is in tech support mode.
I'm going to try with a single fresh disk and see if that changes anything. Is the unit accessible in tech support mode with no disk?
With a single new disk in the unit /dev/sdb1 was the partition I needed and /dev/sdc1 was the usb. I was able to get the VPD file backed up to USB and safely stored away.
If this were to happen to the one good unit as with the other two, I have no way to get the unit to respond to the reset into tech support mode to put the vpd file back.
If I move the single disk that I used with the working unit to either of the non-working units, nothing changes. Both units have exactly the same reaction.
Power on, ReadyNAS appears on screen Approximately 10 seconds later, the backup light turns solid, no change to screen. Units sit there do nothing, regardless of how long I wait. (left running over night)
I tried using the recovery USB approach, but since I can't get the reset button to allow me to choose a boot mode, it never attempts to access the USB to recover.
I even operated under the assumption that the screen possibly was not updating and reset button was working and pushed the backup button 3 and 4 times followed by a single press of reset, to see if the boot mode was working, just not updating the screen. Nothing happens.
I'm almost positive that the 6.10.10 upgrade crashed the flash drive on both units and so long as the unit remaining, it did not need the flash drive intact. Once the units rebooted, the flash was gone and it bricked the units.
Unless there is some way to rewrite the flash drive or whatever it is, I'm not sure what options are left.
Any idea where the flash drive is located?
I stumbled across a post somewhere where someone dismantled one of these units to change the Linux to CENTOS and described a m.2 SSD drive. I wonder if the giant heat-sink is hiding a small ssd drive?
@StephenB wrote: It won't work on an RN316, since that is not a legacy NAS.
But it should work on tne RNDP600U. Where did you get stuck when you went through the steps?
And native OS6 NAS don't rely on a VPD, anyway,
@oldmanpops , have you tried a USB recovery on the units that won't even go into support mode? It sounds like more than just the VPD is corrupt. For a legacy unit running OS6, you need to create an OS4.2.x style recovery USB but put a renamed OS6 image on it. Unless, of course, you want to go back to OS4.2.x.
That won't fix the VPD, but you can copy the good one to the others if that allows you to get to the reset menu and support mode. They'll then all show the same serial number, but that doesn't really matter any more with no Netgear support and ReadyCloud dead.
I ordered all the parts to build an 18 disk NAS server running OpenMediaVault. I think I'll be better off getting away from the Netgear servers, to something that is not proprietary. There are some really nice mother boards and cases for running big NAS servers these days. Back when I bought the ReadyNas units, options were limited.
Thanks for all the help. I'll attempt your suggestion on the recovery usb and post back the results.
No luck, the USB recovery option did not work. Basically two working RNDP600U are bricked.
The pattern that causes this issue seems to be reusing the disks from the 4.x OS with 6.x OS and allowing the 6 OS to update to the latest version. Despite doing the entire upgrade process using a new HDD, the only unit remaining working is the one unit that was never exposed to any old disks from 4.x
If your considering updating older units to OS6 from 4.x, I wouldn't put old disks in the unit after the upgrade. You possibly get away with wiping them on a Linux box, but it's not worth the gamble.
I did manage to build a new OpenMediaVault server and get all of my disks install and running on RAID 5, so I am back up and running. Netgear OS 6 is far superior to OpenMediaVault in a multitude of ways, but it works.
The pattern that causes this issue seems to be reusing the disks from the 4.x OS with 6.x OS and allowing the 6 OS to update to the latest version. Despite doing the entire upgrade process using a new HDD, the only unit remaining working is the one unit that was never exposed to any old disks from 4.x
I did precisely that when I converted my own Pro-6.
While I do see why you are thinking this, I don't see how it can be the cause. There would be lot more people reporting this problem if that were the case.
"Did not work" in what way? Did it appear that the USB recovery process did complete, but it didn't solve the problem (including not being able to use the reset button menu), or did the process not appear to work. The legacy NAS are quite picky about the USB drives you use. If the recovery didn't seem to occur, you are going to need to try other devices. Generally speaking, the older, the better. I've had a lot of luck with the super cheap 8GB ones you can get on Amazon or eBay. Though actually new, they seem to use old technology.
