ReadyNas Ultra 6 problems - help

Cindy · July 31, 2017

Hi all

I have an issue with my readynas (ultra 6)........ one day it suddenly stopped being visible on the network. I had noticed before that on Raidar that it was indicating one or two of the drives were logging an error, but before I could get to replace them the unit stopped connecting and no matter what I couldn't get it to reconnect.

I looked through the netgear website, downloaded various manuals but am at a standstill currently.

I have removed the drives and the unit will boot and recognise there are no drives AND show on Raidar.......once the drives are back in it simply refuses to join the network and be seen on Raidar.

I'm assuming the fact that there may be 1-2 drives that need replacing may be the problem? how can I work out which drives? (6 bay) can I remove 1 drive and see if it boots and comes online or will that cause the data to redistribute it self? I can't recall what raid I am running - I know it was data spread across the drives multiple times, so if I lost 1-2 drives there would be no total data loss.... I'm fairly sure its raid 6 but could be wrong as I didn't set it up....a tech did a long time ago.....

Thoughts? Thanks in advance ......... I'm not very tech savvy as you can tell, but my boys are more computer hardware/software literate and will help me implement any suggestions.......they have tried to help me so far but we are all unsure where to go next.

leadeater · July 31, 2017

You should be able to plug the disks in to a desktop and use a SMART reader to see if any of the disks are failed, or the HDD manufacturers testing tools.

It'll be failing to boot up properly since the NAS OS is copied to the disks so if the array has failed it might be unable to read the OS data.

First find out if you can easily identify any failed disks then after that get another disks not used in the NAS before, wipe it then only put that in to it and try and get it booted and working. Then you should be able to add all the existing non failed disk back to the NAS while it's booted and hopefully there is enough good disks to bring the array back online but in a degraded state.