Scottish Elises

Ive managed to brick by NAS drive at the weekend.
The NAS drive came shipped as a raid 0. I only realised after i copied all my files on to it. Being lazy i then then just left it and it worked perfectly well for 4 years.

At the weekend i decided to change it to raid 1, backed up all the data and too the plunge. Got to about 20% before throwing up an error message, hey presto bricked.

Pretty certain the hard drives are ok, but as there is no operating system on them i cant access them to factory reset. I'm over the edge on my knowledge base!!!!

Its a buffalo linkstation duo, the question is, is it work trying to fix or should i just replace.

I'm no expert, but my first port of call would be to google "reset buffalo linkstation duo"

Here's what I found...

http://www.herzig-net.de/prog/?page=unbrick_ls-wxl

Good luck!

I should say that ive tried all the instructions online and failed, the nas is not showing up at all and im right on the edge of my knowledge base.

A new duo is £130, the min cost of a company fix is £90 so you can see the dilemma

Do you just want it reset and wiped, or the data recovered (assuming it can be)? How big are the drives, and how full are they?

Not worried about data as I backed up before I began. Just looking to get then reset, it's 2x1 terabyte

What this tells me is that this class of device is worthless as a backup device ... you are so lucky that this has happened while reorganizing the drives rather than under normal conditions. So maybe what you should be thinking is:

"Can I make this work again?"

If yes, then (a) no need to buy another and (b) it is probably still worth using as a backup device.

If no, then (a) no desire to buy another because (b) it is useless as a backup device. At that point you would be comparing apples with oranges when it comes to repair vs buy new.

These low end systems are always going to be risky because they are proprietary. When you get a failure you cannot easily migrate the hard drives and data to another system.

One solution is to buy two, one with drives, the other empty as a spare. When the first one fails, move the drives to the second one and then start the ball rolling looking for modern alternates (i.e. two new cheap NAS drives). Of course when you start down this route it is imperative that you test the migration to the spare device before you start to put valuable data on the drive so you know that if and when the time comes, you know what to do and that it will work!

Another solution is to use something open where the physical drives can be migrated between completely different bits of hardware. Primarily this means using something like a PC running, for example, one of the BSD-based NAS distributions (FreeNAS is one, I think). Then when the PC breaks you just need to source a new PC, put the drives in and away you go. Of course PCs are more expensive than your NAS and you would likely need a bigger form factor device just because tiny PCs are relatively poor value compared to normal desk top stuff.

Yet another solution is to go a little bit upmarket where the vendor will actually support users of the older equipment with migration paths to newer hardware. Of course these come at a higher price, but not always punitive ... look at Synology low end devices, perhaps?

I doubt it is worth trying to salvage your Buffalo NAS; it sounds to me like it has munched its motherboard somehow.

Cheers,
Robin

Can you deliver the NAS box to Kintore (or Blackburn during work hours)? It'll do no harm to have a look at it.

Looks like it's going to be fine.

It's back to life, both physical disks report as healthy, latest firmware installed, and the device shows up in the win/mac navigator tools. Password reset to the default admin/password and all the data is gone.

Need to finish off Raid1 setup and full-disk testing tomorrow evening, and it'll be ready on Friday if that's ok?

What happened to it (and will it happen again?).

Cheers,
Robin

A few reports on forums of it getting the same error code and refusing to boot after trying to change raid types, which is exactly what Chris was trying to do, so my guess is a one-off incident. Not one which should have happened, and I wouldn't recommend the product from what I've seen, but not a reason to replace it immediately.

Once I've got it RAID-1, it shouldn't happen again. When a disk does finally die (and they all do) it'll be mirrored, and the admin tools are definitely there to rebuild the array if you remove a dead disk and insert a new one. If that fails, Chris already takes backups from the NAS to a portable USB drive (which I was going to recommend anyway). If that fails, or isn't up to date enough, then the disks are just xfs formatted, so the good one could be pulled out and read on another box.

I don't recommend spending any money on it at the moment.

Proprietary raid is always a risk. Used to be a free nas user and liked the get out of jail option of firing a disk in a PC.

Interestingly I have lunched my main drive in my home PC a few months back and have still to fix it after giving up several times.

It's a 150gb 15k WD Raptor and oddly win7 starts booting then bsod. The bsod points to disk problems and that's it.
I have fired in a fresh disk stuck win7 on that but when i even boot with the raptor plugged in the fresh os bsods when it sniffs it.
Ubuntu live cd does the same.
Amazingly (or not) I get the same bsod when I put it in a external USB enclosure and plug it in to a fresh os.

Ran some ultimate boot disk that has the WD tools which have it a clean bill of health, full surface scan etc not just SMART.

There is no data on it just os and apps but I can't be hooped with a fresh build and just want it up and running to clone to a ssd.

Planning on dropping it on the desk of a *nix ninja at work who loves a challenge.

Any thoughts?

Windows (and Linux) get a bit upset if you install with the hdd controller in EHCI mode and then flip to SATA or vice versa ... this is a BIOS setting. Could it be that you've flipped it somehow?

Cheers,
Robin

The power of SE!!!!


Fantastic.


Greame - probably next week. Heading down to glasgow tomorrow to see Ed shearan.

The funny thing is we mostly use the NAS for music storage, since it bricked i've used spotify much more than i used to so haven't really missed it.

Sanjay - i think i understood about 4 words of your post!!!!

Sanjoy wrote:Proprietary raid is always a risk. Used to be a free nas user and liked the get out of jail option of firing a disk in a PC.

Interestingly I have lunched my main drive in my home PC a few months back and have still to fix it after giving up several times.

It's a 150gb 15k WD Raptor and oddly win7 starts booting then bsod. The bsod points to disk problems and that's it.
I have fired in a fresh disk stuck win7 on that but when i even boot with the raptor plugged in the fresh os bsods when it sniffs it.
Ubuntu live cd does the same.
Amazingly (or not) I get the same bsod when I put it in a external USB enclosure and plug it in to a fresh os.

Ran some ultimate boot disk that has the WD tools which have it a clean bill of health, full surface scan etc not just SMART.

There is no data on it just os and apps but I can't be hooped with a fresh build and just want it up and running to clone to a ssd.

Planning on dropping it on the desk of a *nix ninja at work who loves a challenge.

Any thoughts?

We had something similar, not saying its as yours but maybe,
We had a ASUS MBoard that would not load an OS and BSOD as your case when using default BIOS. Only noticed a few years into operation as batteries started to die on us. When the battery dies its no problem rebooting, only when we were re instlalling an os which in this case was Win7 64Bit but I think I also time tried an ubuntu live cd and same problem.

Hmm it is a hateful Asus P5K mboard and the cmos battery is always resetting the BIOS. Fecking cobblers shoes....