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Products => Storage => : Eastmarch September 06, 2019, 12:25:28 PM

: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Eastmarch September 06, 2019, 12:25:28 PM
Our super awesome user 1000001101000 put together some pages which help DIYers with TFTP reinstalls. Buffalo can't speak to the accuracy or safety of any of this stuff, and we can't support it, so don't take this as advice or an endorsement as the content. Mostly this is for people with an out-of-warranty chassis that they have the desire to reinstall and get back running. Which is super cool.

A few points: Some units have the ability to reinstall firmware built into the box. These are :

TS3000
TS5010, 3010
LS220DE (Not 220 or 210)
LS421D (Not 420 or 410)
LS441DE
LS-WVL/E

In addition, TS5000 has a documented, simple method to reinstall, as does TS-xVL as these are Intel processors capable of USB boot. Any Windows Storage Server unit is provided with reinstall media in the box.

All other NAS units use an ARM processor and the firmware is factory installed on the provided drives, and has no simple way of being reinstalled; as you will see in his links.

His Post:

This consists of first extracting the required firmware files:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Extract_Boot_Files_from_Stock_Firmware

Then booting into EM mode either by TFTP booting with your favorite TFTP utility or by loading the files onto an EXT3 partition on a disk:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Restoring_Stock_Firmware_without_TFTP
or
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Restoring_Stock_Firmware_via_TFTP

finally performing the install using the firmware updater in Debug mode with the "rebuild partition table" and "force update" options selected:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Enable_Debug_mode

I've heard back from folks who done this successfully with just about every ARM based linkstation/terastation model over the past year.

Any oLet me know if you have any questions.

**Intel based devices use a similar process only get into EM mode via a usb recovery disk:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Create_Recovery_Disk_for_Intel-based_Terastation
: Re: TFTP Repair links
: fizux September 11, 2019, 10:59:07 PM
I am grateful for all of the hard work and support provided on this issue, but one problem I have had is that many of the resources (TFTP Repair links, Debian images, etc.) miss the LS-QL series linkstation (e.g. LS-Q4.0TL/R5), which from experience appear not to be compatible with the LS-QVL series.

Any suggestions of an alternate series to try as a replacement, or would it be possible to publish resources for this series?  For example, Debian supported models include:
kuroboxpro, ls-chl, ls-wsgl, ls-wtgl, lspro_ls-gl, ls-chlv2, ls-qvl, ls-vl, ls-wsxl, ls-wvl, ls-wxl, ls-xhl
but not ls-ql.

: Re: TFTP Repair links
: oxygen8 September 12, 2019, 05:39:38 AM
in 2016 it was possible to use debian on LS-QL
https://miniconf.debian.or.jp/assets/files/Debian%20Installer%20for%20Buffalo%20Linkstation%20NAS.pdf
: Re: TFTP Repair links
: 1000001101000 September 12, 2019, 09:53:52 AM
I never noticed that about the LS-QL before. Despite being listed on that slide deck I don't see that a device tree ever ended up in the kernel nor was part of the original project as far as I can see.

Looking at the specs for the various devices I would suspect that the installer for the lspro_ls-gl or ls-chl might work with the LS-QL. There could be differences that prevent leds/buttons/usb ports from working but it's worth a try.

Oddly enough I'm currently working on adding Debian support for additional devices not covered by previous projects (I'll put up a separate post about that at some point). I should be able to add the LS-QL to that project.

Let me know if you have any success with the ls-gl/ls-chl files.

: Re: TFTP Repair links
: 1000001101000 September 12, 2019, 07:57:56 PM
I thought I had an LS-QL but it turned out to be a QVL.

I’m afraid I won’t be able to do any hands-on testing. If you’re able to get it running using the files for another device I can help modify the device tree for the LS-QL if you’re interested.
: Re: TFTP Repair links
: fizux September 13, 2019, 09:38:05 AM
I did try using the LS-QVL firmware, but that did not work and I had to go back to LS-QL.  The slide deck has LS-QL listed as 2nd Gen, and LS-QVL as 3rd Gen.

Thanks, if you have the ability to add a LS-QL branch, I would certainly provide feedback from testing.
: Re: TFTP Repair links
: Eastmarch September 17, 2019, 11:00:48 AM
LS-QL was the same generation as LS-CH. I'd def try it. 
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: oxygen8 September 19, 2019, 12:21:35 AM
LS-CHL with blue webif (HANZEI) uses the Orion chipset, like the LS-QL
The LS-CHL with red webif (YURYAKU) uses the Kirkwood like the LS-QVL

Debian on the old LS-CHLV1:
https://www.onderka.com/computer-und-netzwerk/buffalo-linkstation-live-ls-chl-v1-v2-und-v3/

Maybe it is possible to modify this for the LS-QL
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 September 19, 2019, 10:35:21 AM
We took the conversation offline and have been looking into making this work. The installer for the ls-chl didn't work out of the box, I'm still trying to figure out why.

stay tuned.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: jerryr December 19, 2019, 05:14:01 PM
Greetings All.  Interesting thread. TIA.

Question.......

Background First:

I have a TS5800D2408. I had all 8 bays populated. I only had R5 configured. (I know R6 would have been optimal, but what it was bought for the extra capacity was needed.) A couple of months ago, I lost a drive. This was ok. I bought another and replaced it. The array recovered and went on about it's business.  However, I then lost another drive. I replaced it, however, this time while it was rebuilding I lost a second drive.  This of course is bad as a R5 group can not sustain two drive failures at the same time. No biggie. Most of the important stuff was backed up.

However, I have since removed the two bad drives and have decided to just go with 6. I used the Bootable USB Recovery Image located here: https://www.buffalotech.com/support/downloads/terastation-5000n-series

I was able to boot to the USB drive, have it go through the recovery process and then flip the switch back to boot from the HD.  The system starts but the LED screen stays a purplish pink color. The power button continually flashes and only the Welcome to Terastation is displayed. The display button does not toggle the display. The system does get an IP Address as I can see it given out to the device in my router. When I go to the IP Address the page will load but I only see the outline of some of the shapes. If I use the NAS Navigator, the device does not show up.

Question:

In order to perform this option using the Bootable USB Recovery Image, do I need to make sure that the drives I am using have zero partitions on them and are blank in order for the recovery to work correctly?

If the Bootable USB Recovery will not work to replace everything then what are my options?

Thanks,

Jerry
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: jerryr December 19, 2019, 06:59:56 PM
Ok.. that was the ticket... Needed to have no partitions on the drives and then use the USB Recovery Image.

Thanks for this thread!
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 December 19, 2019, 07:36:22 PM
Sweet. Blank drives is important, usually so is having enough drives
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: BlackScorpion December 24, 2019, 10:22:31 PM
HI guys, new to this NAS thing, i happen to get my hands on a used Buffalo TeraStation-TS-XE8-0TL-R5-4-Bay from a guy who stated it was in excellent working condition.  I brought it from him and when i connected it up to my network  the thing powered up and went thru some type of process , seems to be running correctly, i see on the amber screen " No Init File at HDD0, at the end the light turned red from amber and a message stating emergency mode and no array info. I tried updating the firmware from the updater and i get a beeping sound from the NAS and a message DISK1 signature fail. I;m running on Mac OS 10.14.6 Mojave,  Been trying for a few days now to no-avail, could someone shed some light as to what i can do to get this thing up and running?

 My computer IP is  (f)192.168.1.102, the IP showing on the NAS is (f)192.168.1.10
(https://i18.servimg.com/u/f18/19/79/78/80/screen25.png)

(https://i18.servimg.com/u/f18/19/79/78/80/screen24.png)
Frank
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 December 25, 2019, 05:35:04 AM
sounds like it’s booting off the onboard NAND into EM mode which should make things relatively simple.

You should be able to get running by first ensuring the drives are blank and then running the firmware installer in debug mode with the formatting options enabled:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Enable_Debug_mode

: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: BlackScorpion December 25, 2019, 11:37:30 AM
sounds like it’s booting off the onboard NAND into EM mode which should make things relatively simple.

You should be able to get running by first ensuring the drives are blank and then running the firmware installer in debug mode with the formatting options enabled:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Enable_Debug_mode

 How would i go about ensuring the drives are blank? do i remove them and erase them?  I tried doing the debug thing and kept getting an error message on the Nas as stated above.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 December 25, 2019, 12:40:34 PM
usually I connect them to another system and wipe them or use gdisk to remove the partition table.

if that is inconvenient you can connect to the EM Mode device using acp_commander and wipe the drives directly using dd. If the drives have an MBR type partition table it should be sufficient to just wipe the first few kilobytes of the drive, if it's using GPT you'd need to also wipe out the backup partition table .

 if you want to try it directly on the device you can get a copy of acp_commander here:
https://github.com/1000001101000/acp-commander
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: BlackScorpion December 25, 2019, 03:30:30 PM
I can connect them to my MAC and wipe them, what format would i use to erase them?  MSDOS (fat) or  EXFat?
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 December 25, 2019, 04:56:23 PM
Neither. They need to be blank as in no partition table/filesystem.

I found this which sounds like how to do it on a mac:

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2015/06/20/how-to-delete-partition-mac/

: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: BlackScorpion December 25, 2019, 05:25:22 PM
Neither. They need to be blank as in no partition table/filesystem.

I found this which sounds like how to do it on a mac:

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2015/06/20/how-to-delete-partition-mac/

 On a Mac when you erase a volume it ask you how you want to format  it,  as those instructions show, they selected Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) as you can see in the attached image , those are my selections. It won't erase unless i select one of them.
(https://i18.servimg.com/u/f18/19/79/78/80/screen26.png)

 BTW thanks for the help.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 December 25, 2019, 06:06:55 PM
Sadly, I don’t know my way around a mac very well. You can always use dd to do it from the command prompt.

It should be similar to the linux version though I think the disks are named differently on osx
:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=512 count=1
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: BlackScorpion December 25, 2019, 06:20:22 PM
Sadly, I don’t know my way around a mac very well. You can always use dd to do it from the command prompt.

It should be similar to the linux version though I think the disks are named differently on osx
:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=512 count=1

 Yeah sorry, that code looks Chinese to me.. LOL  , I'm afraid if i erase the drives and won't be able to get it going. I don't have the original setup  software,  so i'm afraid of killing it completely if i erase the drives.

 If i erase the 4 drives with my mac,  how would i be able to reinstall the software, do i just need to reinstall the firmware software?
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: BlackScorpion December 25, 2019, 08:55:36 PM
Good news got into the NAS, finally, i did manage to get some screen shots, hopefully i can get this straighten out. 

I got the following errors :

 disk1_broken_error

 disk4_broken_error

degrade_mode_info

 I need to erase what's on here and start fresh. can someone guide me>  i also got a notice on the NAS window stating h2-4
1-3  raid 5 broken?
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 December 25, 2019, 09:00:59 PM
sounds like progress. I'm not familiar with the error codes and don't know if that means the drives are literally malfunctioning or not. 
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: BlackScorpion December 25, 2019, 09:22:57 PM
sounds like progress. I'm not familiar with the error codes and don't know if that means the drives are literally malfunctioning or not.

 It's alittle progress, how do i go about creating a new raid and deleting what;s there already, since somethings not right with the current setup.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 December 25, 2019, 09:56:35 PM
I think the disks menu somewhere in the webui
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: BlackScorpion December 26, 2019, 11:15:23 AM
I think the disks menu somewhere in the webui

Great success! Got it working re-formatted the drives from the webUi and the light is now blue on the window, have to re-do the Raid once it’s all done with the format and everything else.  Once again thanks for the help.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: BlackScorpion December 28, 2019, 10:31:22 PM
Well i got the TS working i have a problems with drive 4, giving me an error, i'm thinking of just replacing all 4 drives and start new, does anyone know if my Terrastation TS-XEL7D8, (TS-XEL/R5 series) could handle larger size NAS drives? it currently has 4 2TB drives.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Kane88 March 10, 2020, 10:55:08 AM
Well i got the TS working i have a problems with drive 4, giving me an error, i'm thinking of just replacing all 4 drives and start new, does anyone know if my Terrastation TS-XEL7D8, (TS-XEL/R5 series) could handle larger size NAS drives? it currently has 4 2TB drives.
Have you replaced the drives in it yet?   There is a TS-XE12.0TL, so looks like 3's were the most buffalo shipped out for that model.  Maybe it goes higher?  Unknown.  I can confirm 4tb drives do work in that model.  I've tried it.  I have an array formatted to 16TB currently in this model, and it works fine.

To wipe the drives on a MAC, this is what you need.  What you were doing to wipe- won't work.  You need a drive zeroing utility or drive wipe utility.

http://www.killdisk.com/killdisk-mac.htm

Or I'd look to see if Western Digital has wddiag for mac, that will wipe anything.  And should be free also.
And DBAN- darik's boot and nuke works- that's freeware stuff too, but you'd have to make a bootable usb flash drive for that one. 
: Re: TFTP Repair links
: Kane88 March 10, 2020, 11:03:27 AM
I am grateful for all of the hard work and support provided on this issue, but one problem I have had is that many of the resources (TFTP Repair links, Debian images, etc.) miss the LS-QL series linkstation (e.g. LS-Q4.0TL/R5), which from experience appear not to be compatible with the LS-QVL series.
I was just curious if this issue for a TFTP boot image has been resolved for this model.

Is this the correct download page for this device?  A search for LS-Q4.0TL/R5 goes to here:
https://www.buffalotech.com/support/downloads/linkstation-quad

If so, then the TFTP files just have to be extracted from the firmware download on that page...
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 March 10, 2020, 12:32:21 PM
The process works just fine for the LS-QL.

The only issue is that if you load directly to a disk this model (and all Orion/MV78100 based devices) need the inode size of the boot partition set to 128.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: borgan@yahoo.com May 01, 2020, 12:18:57 AM
I have a LS-QVL/R5, and the device started to hang on large uploads.  Support asked me to refresh the firmware, but the device has error E06 after the reboot.  I have gone through all of the steps listed, and am able to blank the disks, add the boot files on an ext3 partition and have the device boot in EM mode.  Any time that I attempt to add the firmware back on (goes through the partition table build, firmware load, and reboot), the device comes back up to the E06.  Can anyone give me any ideas about next steps, if any?  Thanks!
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 May 01, 2020, 08:33:22 AM
Getting all the way through a firmware install without error but still ending up with 6 red blinks is certainly odd. Have you done anything to validate the health of the hard drives?
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: borgan@yahoo.com May 02, 2020, 09:48:16 PM
Good call on the drives.  Checked all four and disk #1 had SMART failures.  I swapped drives 1 and 4 to get the bad drive out of the initial slot.  Unfortunately, it failed after the initial partition, firmware load, and reboot again with an E06.  Will I need to replace that drive?  I was hoping not to until I verified that the NAS was working (would replace otherwise).  Thanks!
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 May 02, 2020, 10:26:44 PM
I don't have a great explanation for why that keeps happening, I would guess it has something to do with the bad drive but I would expect a failing drive to be more of a problem during the firmware install than at boot time in most scenarios.

On thing you can try is pulling that drive out and trying to boot, if it's getting hung up on that drive for some reason that might help.

If that still doesn't work I'd try an install without the bad drive. If you don't have a replacement handy you'll most likely need to trick the device into thinking it's normal to have less than 4 drives at install time ( you can always add more later). I have a note about how to do this in the guide:
java -jar acp_commander.jar -t <device ip address> -c "echo MAX_DISK_NUM=2 >> /etc/nas_feature"

You run that before running lsupdater using acp_commander which can be found here:
https://github.com/1000001101000/acp-commander

: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: borgan@yahoo.com May 04, 2020, 11:23:03 AM
OK, ran through all of that and the same E06 issue is occurring.  Is there a way to image the drives to the specific setup required?  Once the RAID partitions are dropped onto the drives, I cannot get access to them directly for obvious reasons.  It seems that there is something that is either disconnected in this process or has failed in the NAS control board.  Any other ideas on what could be done?  Thanks!
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: borgan@yahoo.com May 04, 2020, 12:04:28 PM
BTW, I did get Disk1 mounted and can review it.  Is there anything specific that I should be looking for or ensuring is there?  Also, would using an older rev of the firmware matter?  Currently using the 1.74 version (latest).
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: borgan@yahoo.com May 04, 2020, 04:36:33 PM
OK, started looking at the drives in the RAID and realized something interesting...  The 1.74 firmware is dropping the uImage files into the first partition as "uImage-88f5182.buffalo" and "uImage-lsp.5.x.buffalo".  When I am re-building the drives from scratch, I set up drive 1 with these files, but had to rename the "uImage-lsp.5.x.buffalo" to "uImage.buffalo" for it to work.  After the latest firmware load and E06 errors, I pulled the first two drives and checked the first partition.  The uImage-lsp filename is not updated, as well as the RAID was still showing four drives instead of two.  I renamed the file on both drives and put them back into the NAS.  Booted it up, the drives resynced and I started getting an E16 instead.  Added the two other drives, rebooted, they all synced , and now the NAS is back up and operational.  That seems like a very wonky thing for the firmware names to cause that issue, especially given that it is the firmware from Buffalo that is causing it. 

Thanks for all of your help and hopefully this helps someone else!
B
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 May 04, 2020, 05:30:11 PM
That makes sense with the errors you've seen though I still don't understand how it got that way. Usually E06 indicates that it is able to access the boot volume has an issue with the boot files themselves (happens a lot when testing alternative OS), E16 usually means it can't find the boot partition.

Not installing/renaming the boot file explains the error, it just seems extremely odd that that would happen without lots of other errors happening at the same time. Ultimately I'd still blame it on the bad drive but exactly how that adds up is still confusing to me.

If you do get a replacement I'd be interested how installing with 4 known good drives turns out for you.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: borgan@yahoo.com May 04, 2020, 07:04:48 PM
Drive is on the way, be here on Friday.  We'll see what happens then.  Thanks!

Other weird thing is that it is trying to recover old shares...  It think that there may be some funk on the device that is causing some issues as well.  I am completely reiniting the device and disks to see what happens.  If that drive were really the problem, I should be getting a deprecated disk which I am not.  I let you know what happens.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: borgan@yahoo.com May 07, 2020, 05:47:58 PM
Last post on this...  New drive arrived and did not change anything.  This is after I initialized/reset the device to factory (which did fix the E16 error issue) and wiped the drives.  The only fix for the E06 is the file rename.  Currently rebuilding the array (RAID 10) and will repopulate the device afterward.  Thanks for your help!
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 May 07, 2020, 08:28:42 PM
I’m glad you were able to work past it. The issue sounds sort of familiar but lots of folks have been restoring these devices without running into it.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: mloh June 17, 2020, 03:27:33 AM
Hi, am new with this forum. Pardon me if this has been asked before. I have a linkstation ls-qvl and recently there is a power failure. as not able to access in, i have switch off and switch on again the linkstation but now the power is on as i can see the light at the back but not in front panel and the ethernet is connected cos is blinking but there are no light indication whatsoever on the function. Any idea if the motherboard is fried or just not able to connect to the drives?

Your respond and help is much appreciated.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 June 17, 2020, 08:43:46 AM
There are a few possible explanations for this. I would start by unplugging the power adapter and plugging it back in and verify whether the led next to where the power adapter connects to the device turns on in addition to the network led. Then try turning it on with the button on the front, if it still doesn't work you can try starting it without drives and see if that makes a difference.

A power failure could put the device in an odd state that can be corrected by unplugging it which has a good chance of resolving your issue. If something is wrong with the power supply or mainboard it could also cause what you are seeing. If the power supply isn't providing the normal amount of power the device might start without drives (which take most of the power).
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: mloh June 18, 2020, 03:38:29 AM
Hi,

Thanks for your reply. I have tried what you have suggested to remove all hard drives and plug in the adapter. The green light is on after plugin the adapter. When press the power button in front, the fan starts turning and the ethernet port lights up (even though the cable is not plug in tho) There are still no lights indication on the front side. Does this means that the mainboard has issue?

Thanks again.

There are a few possible explanations for this. I would start by unplugging the power adapter and plugging it back in and verify whether the led next to where the power adapter connects to the device turns on in addition to the network led. Then try turning it on with the button on the front, if it still doesn't work you can try starting it without drives and see if that makes a difference.

A power failure could put the device in an odd state that can be corrected by unplugging it which has a good chance of resolving your issue. If something is wrong with the power supply or mainboard it could also cause what you are seeing. If the power supply isn't providing the normal amount of power the device might start without drives (which take most of the power).
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 June 18, 2020, 12:11:15 PM
Some sort of mainboard or power supply issue by the sound of it. It's hard to separate the two without additional testing. I've seen basically the same behavior from 12v supplies that were broken and only providing ~5v but have also seen similar from broken boards as well. Either way i can't think of a non-hardware issue at this point. I would say try a different power supply but that assumes you have another 19v supply handy which is somewhat unlikely.

If only the leds failed for some reason it might look like it was doing nothing when actually mostly working, but I doubt there's a scenario that would cause all front leds to fail without taking out more vital things as well.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: gbymb June 20, 2020, 08:36:35 AM
I found the plug on the back to be a bit flacky. I suggest you unplug from the nas and the power from the wall, and hit the connector and plug with some cleaner lube. I've seen them spark when the connector was moved. And it's probably stuck in a funny state because of it. I'd be tempted to do a reset...hold down fuction, hit power, let go of power, continue holding the function down for 6 secs. I'll take a good 5 or so mins to boot back, and flash lights and restart, a few times, but it may fix it. Of course your settings will be gone but your data will be fine. ( someone pls back me up on this :) and goodluck
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: lee_mackey August 28, 2020, 07:31:10 PM
I spent way too much time today trying to get my old LinkStation LS-WX2.0TL/R1 to boot with two new drives. But now it's working, so thanks to OP and everyone else who chipped in. Some details that may help with certain steps of the process:

1. Wiping disks: If wiping drives from Windows, note that if there is an EFI partition, it will likely be protected. In that case you may use diskpart, a command-line tool. Get a command prompt (run as administrator), then type 'diskpart'. Once in diskpart, do 'list disks', then 'select Disk 1' (or whatever your disk is to wipe), then 'clean' (no quotes for any of those commands). Choose the correct disk!!

2. Extracting firmware: From the firmware update directory, I had to rename initrd.img and uImage.img to initrd.zip and uImage.zip, respectively. Then I chose to Extract all... and dumped the contents into the same directory as the originals (the directory where you will serve your files via TFTP). When done, I had to rename those .zip files back with .img extensions, otherwise the updater program would complain. You may need to change your Windows setting to "view extensions" to do this renaming. Another note: there were two uImage-xxx.buffalo files; I choose to extract and rename the one that more closely resembled my model name, and the NAS seems to be operating correctly now, but just to note, after flashing the firmware, the default unit name was given as LS-WXLA43.

3. To enable the NAS to talk to the TFTP server, I had to:
    * disable firewall
    * Set my IP to 192.168.11.1/24
    * reboot the NAS using this sequence:
        - reboot holding function button
        - when blue function light flashes, release function button, then press it again
        - wait for device to go into E06 error (red LED blinks six times)
        - press function button again -- had to hold it down for a few seconds.

4. Watch your TFTP server logs to see if the files start transferring. Once they've transferred, you may have to wait a few minutes for the NAS to show up in NAS Navigator. It should appear in Emergency mode. You can shut down your TFTP server when you get to this point.

5. NAS Navigator then asked me if I wanted to correct an auto-assigned IP address on the NAS. At first I said yes, and tried to assign it an address in the 192.168.11.0/24 range, but that led to major problems in the next phase--I'll leave out the gory details. So the next time thru, I left the auto-assigned address alone and changed my PC's IP and netmask to match--this was in the 169.254.0.0/16 range. Sometimes NAS Navigator asks for an admin password—this is "password" (no quotes).

6. When running LSUpdater, be sure to click the ICON at top left corner, NOT the drop-down menu. I didn't even realize that icon was holding a menu the first time I went through this! Then select "Debug..." It wasn't clear if any of these options were to be changed or not, but I left them alone. If you get a message about "partition not found", you will need to check the box to "partition tables". When the process is complete, the device should update and reboot (possibly more than once) on its own. Wait for the entire process to complete—it takes quite a while. Watch the LEDs for possible clues as to where the NAS in the process. You might need to manually reboot it at some point...

7. When everything came back up again, I found to my great amusement (*cough*) that the web interface was in Japanese. You'll need to log in with admin/password, then choose the 4th item in the dark grey bar ("System" in Japanese), then the third red bar down ("Language" in Japanese), then click the button in that panel. It will let you change to "English", but you should also choose "CP437" as Windows Client Language.

I repeated the whole process with a second set of disks just to make sure I didn't screw any of my notes up majorly. Your mileage may vary. Good times!
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: dwd September 04, 2020, 11:21:29 AM
Thank you 1000001101000 for all of the helpful information, it got me pretty far i the process and I feel like I am just missing something.

I have a LS210D0201, the hard drive died so I replaced it with a 1TB and formatted it to GPT and EXT3.

Through lots of searching I found the buffalo TFTP. I used the 1000001101000 method to extract the files from the firmware and I am able to get the drive into emergency mode.

Then I change the computer IP to the same as the one given to the drive and the TSUpdater, I tried it with and without the debug mode and it still has an issue. It looks like it goes through the process of installing the firmware and everything looks good and then it sits on the rebooting status until it goes through and says it lost the connection. At this point the drive and been flashing error 25 (2 slow 5 fast orange lights) I let it sit over night flashing these lights but it did not do anything. Am I missing anything? Thanks
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 September 04, 2020, 11:32:32 AM
I have a LS20D0201, the hard drive died so I replaced it with a 1GB and formatted it to GPT and EXT3.

What model is this? I Think you are missing a number it your post. If it is a 2-bay model you usually need both drives present for an install to succeed.

Also, I assume you mean 1TB drive or something similar. Most models will only install on drives larger than 20GB or so.

Sounds like you're really close. It might be worth checking the user manual to see if it says what that particular LED code is (I don't know if off hand). But my guess is you should try again with both drives installed.

: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: dwd September 04, 2020, 12:17:24 PM
It is the LS210D single drive and yes it is a 1TB sorry about the typos.

The error code is I25 in the manual  "Updating the LinkStation firmware"
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 September 04, 2020, 12:20:14 PM
hmm. I guess I haven't noticed it do that before, though it's been a while since I've done it myself.

If it were me I'd probably leave it like that for ~20min and then manually power it off/on. If it comes up cleanly after that great, if not I'd start over and see if it does it again the second time. 
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Tiderfish September 12, 2020, 01:21:23 AM
Greetings,

I found an older unit in my basement with no drive. It is a LS-1000GL, so a single drive Link Station. I followed all the directions here but am getting stuck with the TFTP upload of the firmware at 19%. Every time it is at 19%. I have tried two different drives, and have scrubbed the old partitions off. They are detected as unformatted in Windows. I even tried the diskpart to "clean" them.

I am not sure, but listening real close to the unit, it sounds like it starts reading or writing the drive for the first time when the TFTP errors out.

Thank you for keeping this post active. I is nice to be able to keep these units out of the landfill, once the hard drive inevitability dies.

Matt
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 September 12, 2020, 08:53:24 AM
Is it lsupdater or your tftp program stopping at 19%? Your post sounded like it was the tftp program.

The TFTP portion of the process doesn’t actually use the drive. The device’s boot loader reaches out to the TFTP server and loads the boot files directly into memory and then boots from them.

In either case it’s probably worth checking out the drive. If it is failing the firmware install likely won’t go well.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Tiderfish September 12, 2020, 11:36:03 AM
Sorry for the ambiguous post. I tried posting a screen shot but was unable too.

The device connects to the TFTP server when the firmware I downloaded for this unit (and renamed it to uImage.buffalo) is in it's server directory. The TFTP starts transferring, but stops at 19%, even the same bit value every time. This is a 74MB file it is choking on, and every time it dies on 14,744,576

I plugged this drive into windows before hand, it is used, but had an OS on it, and seemed to be working fine. It also failed at the same exact byte marker as the 1st drive I tried.

I am using TFTP by Jounin, and have never seen something like this before in my moderate TFTP useage.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Tiderfish September 12, 2020, 01:14:43 PM
Ok I just started the whole process over with fresh downloads and copied the TFTP log, I am getting a timeout.
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 2633 [12/09 13:56:55.013]
Read request for file <uImage.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 13:56:55.013]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 13:56:55.019]
Using local port 60552 [12/09 13:56:55.019]
TIMEOUT waiting for Ack block #28799  [12/09 13:57:28.529]


So here is the process I am doing.
1. download and unzip firmware from buffalo's site. its version 1.15

2. find and open unzip the initrd.img file, it requires a password so I put it in from the wiki page. Copy the initrd.buffalo file from within the image to the C:\TFTP-Root\

3. do the same process for the hddrootfs.img file. This contains a file named hddrootfs.buffalo.updated, I copy that into TFTP-root, and rename it uImage.buffalo

4. I connect my laptop's NIC directly to the Ethernet port on the Linkstation (LS-1000GL, and I set my NIC's ip address to 192.168.11.1/32

5. I launch TFTP, and plug in and power on the Linkstation.

6. after a few seconds, the buzzer beeps loudly. I momentarily press the front panel button, to silence the buzzer but not turn off the unit.

7. after a few moments the NIC goes active, and the uImage.buffalo file is pulled down from the TFTP server.

8. I notice sometimes I get 1 file transfer window dialog pop up, and other times I get two dialog. but the second does not transfer. Its like it is trying to pull the same image twice.

9.TFTP times out, at 19% and eventually the Linkstation will shutdown and beep again until silenced.


Am I missing a step? Do i need more files in the TFTP-Root directory than just those two buffalo files?
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 September 12, 2020, 01:22:17 PM
your uImage.buffalo should be extracted from something named similar to uImage.buffalo (this is the kernel).

What you're seeing is the bootloader crashing/running out of memory because it is trying to load the entire firmware filesystem (~75MB) when it's expecting the kernel file (~4MB).
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Tiderfish September 12, 2020, 02:54:04 PM
Thanks for that! So I renamed the 4MB initird.bufflao to uImage.buffalo, and the device finally made a full transfer. Then it started requesting the initird.buffalo file again. So I copied another one into the tftp-root directory, and it copied that. Then it copied the first one again. It was looping between the two. So I thought if I renamed the 74MB firmeware file back to uImage.buffalo, maybe it would take it. But it just crashed again at 19%. Here is the log. I just rebooted it to see if it is in recovery mode, and it seems to have the same stuff.

Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 4055 [12/09 15:39:08.777]
Read request for file <uImage.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:39:08.778]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 15:39:08.785]
Using local port 65086 [12/09 15:39:08.785]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 4074 [12/09 15:39:18.793]
Read request for file <uImage.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:39:18.793]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 15:39:18.793]
Using local port 50368 [12/09 15:39:18.793]
<uImage.buffalo>: sent 9479 blks, 4852968 bytes in 14 s. 0 blk resent [12/09 15:39:32.300]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 2162 [12/09 15:39:32.341]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:39:32.342]
File <initrd.buffalo> : error 2 in system call CreateFile The system cannot find the file specified. [12/09 15:39:32.342]
TIMEOUT waiting for Ack block #0  [12/09 15:39:33.789]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 1160 [12/09 15:39:42.378]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:39:42.378]
File <initrd.buffalo> : error 2 in system call CreateFile The system cannot find the file specified. [12/09 15:39:42.378]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 1412 [12/09 15:39:52.414]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:39:52.414]
File <initrd.buffalo> : error 2 in system call CreateFile The system cannot find the file specified. [12/09 15:39:52.414]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 4052 [12/09 15:40:02.451]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:40:02.451]
File <initrd.buffalo> : error 2 in system call CreateFile The system cannot find the file specified. [12/09 15:40:02.451]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 2595 [12/09 15:40:12.487]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:40:12.487]
File <initrd.buffalo> : error 2 in system call CreateFile The system cannot find the file specified. [12/09 15:40:12.487]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 1402 [12/09 15:40:22.522]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:40:22.525]
File <initrd.buffalo> : error 2 in system call CreateFile The system cannot find the file specified. [12/09 15:40:22.525]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 1686 [12/09 15:40:32.561]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:40:32.561]
File <initrd.buffalo> : error 2 in system call CreateFile The system cannot find the file specified. [12/09 15:40:32.562]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 3825 [12/09 15:40:42.597]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:40:42.598]
File <initrd.buffalo> : error 2 in system call CreateFile The system cannot find the file specified. [12/09 15:40:42.599]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 3629 [12/09 15:40:52.635]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:40:52.635]
File <initrd.buffalo> : error 2 in system call CreateFile The system cannot find the file specified. [12/09 15:40:52.635]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 1844 [12/09 15:41:02.671]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:41:02.671]
File <initrd.buffalo> : error 2 in system call CreateFile The system cannot find the file specified. [12/09 15:41:02.671]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 3662 [12/09 15:41:12.708]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:41:12.708]
File <initrd.buffalo> : error 2 in system call CreateFile The system cannot find the file specified. [12/09 15:41:12.708]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 2985 [12/09 15:41:22.744]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:41:22.744]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 15:41:22.752]
Using local port 58896 [12/09 15:41:22.752]
<initrd.buffalo>: sent 9479 blks, 4852968 bytes in 14 s. 0 blk resent [12/09 15:41:36.418]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 1431 [12/09 15:41:37.652]
Read request for file <uImage.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:41:37.652]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 15:41:37.652]
Using local port 58900 [12/09 15:41:37.652]
<uImage.buffalo>: sent 9479 blks, 4852968 bytes in 14 s. 0 blk resent [12/09 15:41:51.221]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 3828 [12/09 15:41:51.262]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:41:51.262]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 15:41:51.263]
Using local port 58901 [12/09 15:41:51.263]
<initrd.buffalo>: sent 9479 blks, 4852968 bytes in 13 s. 0 blk resent [12/09 15:42:04.820]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 2422 [12/09 15:42:06.054]
Read request for file <uImage.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:42:06.054]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 15:42:06.054]
Using local port 58902 [12/09 15:42:06.054]
<uImage.buffalo>: sent 9479 blks, 4852968 bytes in 13 s. 0 blk resent [12/09 15:42:19.612]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 3037 [12/09 15:42:19.654]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:42:19.654]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 15:42:19.654]
Using local port 58903 [12/09 15:42:19.654]
<initrd.buffalo>: sent 9479 blks, 4852968 bytes in 14 s. 0 blk resent [12/09 15:42:33.184]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 2504 [12/09 15:42:34.418]
Read request for file <uImage.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:42:34.418]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 15:42:34.418]
Using local port 58904 [12/09 15:42:34.418]
<uImage.buffalo>: sent 9479 blks, 4852968 bytes in 13 s. 0 blk resent [12/09 15:42:47.964]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 1169 [12/09 15:42:48.005]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:42:48.006]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 15:42:48.006]
Using local port 58905 [12/09 15:42:48.006]
<initrd.buffalo>: sent 9479 blks, 4852968 bytes in 13 s. 0 blk resent [12/09 15:43:01.592]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 3786 [12/09 15:43:02.825]
Read request for file <uImage.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 15:43:02.825]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 15:43:02.825]
Using local port 58909 [12/09 15:43:02.825]
TIMEOUT waiting for Ack block #28792  [12/09 15:44:09.026]
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 September 12, 2020, 03:01:33 PM
You need to serve to files on your TFTP server, initrd.buffalo and uImage.buffalo.

For this model initrd.buffalo is extracted from initrd.img, uImage.buffalo can be used as-is from the firmware zip.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Tiderfish September 12, 2020, 03:59:21 PM
YESSSSSS That worked!!! Thanks!

Now I see the device in NAS Navigator 2, it is in emergency mode, as expected. However when I extract the firmware to a folder and run the LSupdater.exe it abruptly closes on Win10x64. I tried a 32bit windows7 machine, and it actually gives me an error with an appcrash report.

So I downloaded another firmware from a different model, a LS-V174, and copied the LSupdater.exe and lsupdater.ini files into the same dir as the proper firmwares, and it now launches, but tells me "Linkstation that needs updating wasn't found."

We are sooo close!

Thanks again for your help!
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Tiderfish September 12, 2020, 04:06:29 PM
Here is the latest TFTP log, I see it is still getting a time out, and even after running this, If I reboot the device, it will connect back and download the images again.

Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 1402 [12/09 17:01:54.042]
Read request for file <uImage.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 17:01:54.042]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 17:01:54.042]
Using local port 52148 [12/09 17:01:54.042]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 2878 [12/09 17:02:04.057]
Read request for file <uImage.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 17:02:04.057]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 17:02:04.057]
Using local port 63040 [12/09 17:02:04.057]
<uImage.buffalo>: sent 3535 blks, 1809460 bytes in 5 s. 0 blk resent [12/09 17:02:09.082]
Connection received from 192.168.11.150 on port 2036 [12/09 17:02:09.123]
Read request for file <initrd.buffalo>. Mode octet [12/09 17:02:09.124]
OACK: <timeout=5,> [12/09 17:02:09.124]
Using local port 63041 [12/09 17:02:09.124]
TIMEOUT waiting for Ack block #0  [12/09 17:02:19.046]
<initrd.buffalo>: sent 9479 blks, 4852968 bytes in 13 s. 0 blk resent [12/09 17:02:22.628]
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Tiderfish September 12, 2020, 05:06:11 PM
AHA! Did some googleing, and came across another poor soul having a similar issue. His solution was to edit the LSUpdater.ini file and add a couple of flags. When I went in there, I noticed the listed devices were wrong, because I brought this INI with the working LSUpdater.exe from the other download. So I deleted the bad INI, and imported the good one from the correct firmware download. Then I added the same flags he did. At last it would find the device. However when pressing the button to update the firmware, it said something like no partition firmware update aborted. So I changed the noformat option to 0 and it started loading the firmware!... for about 5 minutes, then I got an error that the uImage.buffalo file was missing. So I copied that into the same dir, and it wouldn't resume. Now I the updater program is having problems finding the unit again.

Here are the flags I used
Edit LSUpdater.ini
[Flags]
VersionCheck = 0
NoFormatting = 1 (changed this to 0 to let it format the partitions)

[SpecialFlags]
Debug=1
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 September 12, 2020, 07:35:24 PM
Which debug options did you use?
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Tiderfish September 12, 2020, 09:12:56 PM
WE GOT IT WORKING!!!

I think part of my problem is my Intel Pro NIC on my laptop didn't like connecting and disconnecting to the nas and a switch all the time. So it was making the transition from TFTP on 192.168, to DHCP with the LSUpdater more of a challenge. My solution to this was to put in a small switch between the nas, and laptop, for the TFTP on 192.168, then plug in an uplink to it so the nas can get dhcp to be found on the network. This is of course with all the other steps in place like the modified INI file, and the commandeered lsupdater from another firmware.

Once it finally loaded, the web-gui page was all in Japanese! I was thinking I downloaded the wrong firmware. Luckily I was able to log in and change the default language.

Thanks again 1000001101000, or should I call you 'h'? I was looking for a challenge today, but I didn't think it would have gone THAT far!

PS. Now that I have it all configured I am playing around with adding it to my Active Directory, and running into some issues. Should I just start a new thread for that?
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: clippingxpert September 23, 2020, 01:07:02 AM
Sweet. Blank drives is important, usually so is having enough drives
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 October 13, 2020, 10:05:31 PM
I haven't looked to closely at the ls-wxl boot-loader but I assume it's similar to the others I've looked at.

On the devices I've looked at the bootrom appears to turn on the red led before starting the bootloader. The bootloader turns it back of early in the boot process around when it starts flashing the power led. If the bootloader fails to load the red led just stays on. I've actually confirmed this behavior by wiping the bootloader on an ls210 with an spi programmer.

So one possibility is that the bootloader got corrupted.

I've also heard of similar behavior when there is something wrong with the power supply, odd behavior happens if it can't provide enough power. You could try booting the device without drives and see if anything changes (most of the power goes to powering the drives).
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 October 13, 2020, 10:54:29 PM
You could try re-flashing the chip with one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07R5LPTYM

If the only problem is that the data on the chip got corrupted somehow that might fix it. I don’t know what the odds are of that but it’s something to try.

If you do decide to give it a try I can help with the procedure, I’ve done it several times testing other issues. Maybe if I get some time I’ll write up a wiki page about it.

: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 October 13, 2020, 11:24:54 PM
I've been happy the programmer I bought (the one from the link). It's been pretty useful for how cheap it was.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 October 25, 2020, 05:08:46 PM
Start by disassembling the device. I have some notes about that from the LS-WVL which uses the same basic design:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Linkstation_LS-WVL#Disassembly

once you get the access to the main board you'll want to locate the 8-pin chip containing the bootloader. Usually they make the chip with a colored dot after they program it which make them easy to identify. On some models there is a small ~16k chip for the bootrom and in addition to the ~512K-1M bootloader chip.

see if you can dump the chip with the programmer. that could help confirm whether the chip is working or not.

: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 October 26, 2020, 10:33:38 PM
Nice!

Take a look at the last 64K of the dump. You should see the bootlaoder environment variables there. After reflashing you'll want to set some of them again such as the MAC address and serial#

You can use this process to get the bootloader image:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Extract_Boot_Files_from_Stock_Firmware

it's usually in u-boot.img.

you can then try flashing it to the chip and see if that improves things. Depending on your software you may need to pad it with zeros to match the size of the chip.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 October 28, 2020, 07:49:01 PM
Nice!

would you be interested in writing up the procedure so I can add it to the wiki?
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 October 28, 2020, 10:18:57 PM
Great!

Once you put that together I'll add some notes on how to use some linux console tools as well.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: FrankC December 02, 2020, 06:53:02 PM
Lee Macky
Thanks so much for this:

"changed my PC's IP and netmask to match--this was in the 169.254.0.0/16 range."

The tftp worked fine, but when I ran  LSUpdater.exe, I could not communicate with the LS410D until I changed my PC ip address to be in the range of the NAS.  It then rebooted and picked another IP address and I again had to change my PC to match.  But after all that, I was able to get into the web admin interface and set up the unit.

Thanks again
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 January 06, 2021, 10:30:57 AM
Fantastic!

I'll add it to the wiki when I get a moment.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: ukdiveboy April 21, 2021, 06:34:38 PM
Hi,

I dropped my LS210D on the floor!  I replaced the harddrive with an "identical" Toshiba drive that I just bought.

I've followed all the steps in this thread to try fix the device.  I've gone through a few times to make sure I didn't miss anything.  I haven't been able to get the thing working.

I'm able to get the device to boot into EM mode, but after that is where I get stuck.  One of two things happen:
 - If I create just a single 1G ext3 partition (just like here: https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Restoring_Stock_Firmware_without_TFTP) the unit never gets out of the E25 (firmware update) state.
 - If I create four partitions to try mirror the state of the original drive, I seems like I can recover the device, but then when I try configure the unit (through web interface) it refuses to format the user partition.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

One other thing.  I downloaded the latest LSUpdater, and for me it doesn't have a "Rebuild Partition Table" check-box.
(http://sagar.org/blog.sagar.org/images/2021/04/LSUpdater-Debug.jpg)
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: oxygen8 April 23, 2021, 01:37:39 AM
Start with partitionless disks with gpt.

My old german howto:
http://oxygen8.bplaced.net/E06.htm
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: ukdiveboy April 30, 2021, 11:46:46 PM
Maybe the GPT suggestion helped, or maybe I just needed to be more patient!

This time I partitioned with GPT.  I still created all 5 partitions (to match the old damaged drive).  I was still unable to use the web management UI to set-up the share drive on the NAS.  However, I was able to use the web management UI to "reset to factory defaults". 

When I reset the device back to factory defaults it spent over two days reformatting the harddrive.  This time I was able to monitor the progress through the web management UI.  According to the UI, It was writing 1s, then 0s then 1s again to the hard drive.  The LED on the front spent the whole two days blinking E22. 

Thanks for the suggestion!
Rik.

Start with partitionless disks with gpt.

My old german howto:
http://oxygen8.bplaced.net/E06.htm
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: oxygen8 May 03, 2021, 03:28:48 AM
Again
The normal way is to start with a unpartitioned disk in gpt mode.


This is not nessesary or recommendet:
" I still created all 5 partitions "
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: dieten2000 October 28, 2021, 04:19:30 AM
Hello, I have this issue with a Linkstation Mini LS-WSX and tried the steps described here.
But I am failing already in the first step with tftp.
Maybe someone can help.
I've two new blank disks. I set my laptop to IP 192.168.11.1/24 and directly connect to the LS with a patch cable. But in the tftp command window nothing is logged. The tftp listens on 192.168.11.1:69 but there is no request from the LS to be seen.

So my idea is, that the 192.168.11/24 simply is not the correct network for the Linkstation Mini.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 November 02, 2021, 12:55:06 PM
I'm reasonable sure it isn't an IP address issue for TFTP, I believe that model uses the same bootloader image as the ls-wxl which I know folks have don't via TFTP. The address has also been the same for a wide array of devices spanning a very long time.

I'm not a big fan of the TFTP process because it gets hard to troubleshoot like this. I typically go with the other option.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: dieten2000 November 04, 2021, 10:50:59 AM
Thank you. But I am a little helpless and stuck with my Linkstation Mini.
I don't see my LS-WSX in NAS Navigator or in TFTP neither in my network where it once worked (192.168.0.x/24) nor when I change network to 192.168.11.x/24). (I am on a Win 10 laptop.)
More worse, I cannot remember the IP address the LS once had, since it worked for years.

How to use the options described here or acp_commander without knowing the IP address?

Any help is appreciated.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 November 04, 2021, 11:21:40 AM
If the device is on the network this should detect it.
java -jar acp_commander.jar -f


It uses the same protocol as NasNavigator, if NN can't see it neither will acp_commander. It will only show up when you get at least to EM mode which can be achieved I've with TFTP or the other method I mentioned earlier.

For TFTP your PC needs to be 192.168.11.1 and you may need to adjust your PC's firewall to allow the standard TFTP ports to come in.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: dieten2000 November 05, 2021, 06:13:43 AM
Sorry, my LS will not show up when I connect with 192.168.11.1.
The red LED flashes 6 times upon switch on. When pressing the function key the red flash is ending and the linkstation logo flashes blue as if it would be booting. But this is infinite as well.

So it does not show up in 192.168.11.x/24 nor in 192.168.0.x/24 (my home network), neither with red flashing nor with blue flashing.
I think I am at no point in Emergency Mode. How to get there?

Another point: I have replaced with two brandnew HDDs at the same time (same manufacturer and type as before) and created GPT and quickformatted with NTFS. The reason for that was that I got Disk Errors a lot on one disk but I did not know which one. So I replaced both, as advised from Buffalo Support. While the disk errors got more and more and I switched off and on I remember that it then already disappeared from NAS Navigator.


: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: dieten2000 November 06, 2021, 10:58:12 AM
Finally I got it.
Luckily yesterday I received from Buffalo boot files and documentation. All was exactly the same as described here. The only differences were the tftp boot files initrd.buffalo and uImage.buffalo. I am not fully sure since there was no error logging, but I assume that I simply had two wrong files.
Now my LS Mini is back to life with the brand new disks.

192.168.11.1/24 for the PC is correct.

Thank you.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 November 06, 2021, 02:32:47 PM
Cheers!
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: banichi November 20, 2021, 10:44:08 PM
I am glad to see this topic since I have been trying to bring my out-of-warranty LS220DE back to life after it has sat powered down for several years. I don't recall at this point what happened when I set it up initially, but right now it has two WD Red 3TB drives in it which are brand new and never used as far as I know. I originally bought the LS220DE without drives, and added the two it now has. I don't know if I ever got it working originally. NOW, I have some time and have tried several times to rehabilitate it without success. The trouble starts with the drive not shutting down when the switch on the back is turned off - I have to pull the power cable out to shut it off. I looked through the manual but found only an initialization procedure on page 91 which directed me to turn the Linkstation on while holding down the function button (the function LED starts flashing white) and then press the function button again. The LEDs start flashing white (both of them in the front) and the instructions say that initialization will take 5 to 10 minutes. This is where it becomes a further problem: 1) NAS Navigator2 never sees it, 2) the flashing LEDs never stop flashing, though I left it running for 2+ hours just to see if it would 'finish' itself. 3) The drive was still flashing when I tried to turn it off with the power switch on the back, and as before the power switch does not turn it off. I again had to pull the power cable out of the back to turn it off.

This looks to me like an internal electronic failure, but I don't know where to go from here, and since it is out-of-warranty I can't get any help from Buffalo. I would appreciate very much any guidance anyone can give me about this. At this point I am looking at recycling the drives and getting rid of the enclosure, but I would love it if someone could tell me a way to get it working again. 6TB of network storage would be great to have!
Thanks,
Michael
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 December 14, 2021, 04:26:45 PM
@dumbbee

It sounds like you started with TFTP and couldn't make that work. There are various reasons that could be including firewall issues. I tend to avoid that method because it can be hard to troubleshoot but it does work for some people.

Later it sounds like you loaded the files the boot partition and successfully got it to boot (solid white led). That should mean you're successfully in EM mode.

If you're getting to EM mode you should see the device in LSUpdater. If you are not seeing it that could also be because a firewall/etc is blocking the UDP broadcast packets it uses to detect these devices.

For reference:
Solid White LED = successful boot (could be full FW, EM mode, Debian etc)
7 red blink LED   = Boot partition not found or invalid. Could mean missing drive, no partition #1, partition #1 too big, partition #1 not ext3 etc.
6 red blink LED  =  Boot partition readable but boot files missing or invalid
Flashing white LED = Device still trying to boot from disk/TFTP/etc



: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 December 16, 2021, 01:50:20 PM
It has to be small for the bootloader to read it, 1GB should be good for that model.

I would think gparted would be fine. I usually use gdisk which which can protect you from some potential issues that gparted might not.

The files go into the "root" of the partition.

If you are copying the files to the disk there is no need for TFTP.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 December 16, 2021, 07:58:28 PM
What are the LEDs doing now?
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 December 17, 2021, 08:15:37 AM
stay white == good. You shouldn't get 7xRED just from swapping files though (as far as i remember).

Id suggest doing the fw unpack/partition/format/copy from the command line and then post the full output. I can tell were things go wrong if you do that, otherwise I'm just guessing.

For the non-TFTP process I'd recommend connecting it to your normal network rather than directly to your PC. Maybe that way you can see if your router sees it even if your PC does not.
 

: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Jeff Patton June 18, 2022, 04:53:49 PM
Hello, I have a very small brain so I'm going to be asking a lot of dumb questions.
I'll start out with the background.
Model: TS-QVH12TL/R6
Do you have the uimage.buffalo and intrd.buffalo files: Yes
Have you tried following the directions: gods help me yes I'm trying
OS: Windows, but I know people who are at least somewhat familiar with Linux if I cannot figure it out myself on windows.

What steps have you done so far:
I read over https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Restoring_Stock_Firmware_via_TFTP
I downloaded tftpd64
step 3 says "Configure your PC to have IP address 192.168.11.1"


And that's where I'm stuck. tftpd64 has a dropdown with several options but none of them are that. Should I be setting my ethernet port's ipv4 settings to 192.168.11.1? Furthermore it says "configure it to server the boot files" but I haven't the first clue how to do that? *help* If someone could walk my dumb butt through doing this I'd be eternally grateful.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 June 18, 2022, 05:30:03 PM
That’s an Intel-based device, the boot process it a bit different. You’ll need to boot from a recovery image on a usb drive.

Support can typically sell you one on an SD card.

There’s also a process to make your own:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Create_Recovery_Disk_for_Intel-based_Terastation

Once you use that to boot into em mode the process for installing the firmware is basically the same as other models.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 June 18, 2022, 06:16:32 PM
(Then you can follow the non-TFTP process)

https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Restoring_Stock_Firmware_without_TFTP
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Birdman23 August 17, 2022, 03:42:31 PM
111101010111..  (sp? LOL)   Nice work, and thanks for spending the time to help folks....   BUT,

Absolutely CRAZY!  The fact you would need to get a EE or CS degree (which I have!) to try and rebuild the firmware onto a $200 NAS device because of a failed HD is non-sense.  After quickly reading thru this, I'm going to just throw the dead LS420D in the garbage and go buy something else.  I don't quite understand how it is sooooo complicated to simply re-load a firmware onto a simple nas drive?  A boot chip to store the firmware on would have cost about $1.

What am I missing?   Anyway, off to find a new drive since this is the 2nd time Buf has done this to me.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 August 17, 2022, 03:52:29 PM
If you have a CS degree you might be interested in replacing the firmware with a Debian install:
https://github.com/1000001101000/Debian_on_Buffalo

Having the firmware/OS on the drives is my favorite thing about these since it simplifies installing/testing custom OS stuff.

: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: bobrooney August 25, 2022, 02:49:40 AM
finally performing the install using the firmware updater in Debug mode with the "rebuild partition table" and "force update" options selected:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Enable_Debug_mode
I downloaded latest firmware for my TeraSation 1200D but I don't have "rebuild partition table" as an option.

(https://i.postimg.cc/N2M13sPS/bf001.png) (https://postimg.cc/N2M13sPS)

Is that because of firmware version or something else?
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 August 25, 2022, 06:27:15 AM
They seem to have started removing that option from the updaters. I could only speculate as to why.

There is a workaround I’ve been meaning to add to the wiki:
https://forums.buffalotech.com/index.php?topic=28446.msg117764#msg117764

It might be worth contacting support see what the official solution is for firmware re-install now that they’ve made that change.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: bobrooney August 26, 2022, 01:30:59 AM
I found another workaround that was easier for me.

Since you said that this came with new versions of firmware I searched for an older version of a firmware and found version 1.66 on Softpedia.
That version (1.66) has that necessary option so I installed 1.66 in Debug mode with "rebuild partition table" and "force update" options selected and after that normally installed latest (1.68) in normal mode.

Thanks a lot 1000001101000.

Btw... Just one more question. I saw in first post on this topic that firmware for my Terastation is installed on drives. Which one? Fist one, second? Or both?
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 August 26, 2022, 08:16:30 AM
It installs it to all of the drives.

Specifically it creates a separate raid1 volume for boot,swap and rootfs which spans all the drives.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: bobrooney August 26, 2022, 09:36:11 AM
Thanks a lot for clarification.
I understand now why some problems happened to me during this process and why this is not just putting new drives in bay and formatting.

Cheers!
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: racer24 October 23, 2022, 04:09:14 PM
Hello All,
I am having problem with getting my NAS working. I have a TS-WX2.0TL/R1 two drive unit that I got with no hard drives installed.  I installed two 500 GB drives that I removed all of the partitions from using Windows 10 administrative tools, so they should be blank drives. It will boot into EM and I can see it in NAS Navigator.  I am trying to update the firmware and have several different versions to try to get around the problem of the newest updater having the "rebuild partition table" and "force update" option greyed out. Currently I have tried FW1.71 but when I try to do the update and force it to update the partition tables, it just beeps and starts flashing red. I have used acp commander to input the line of code listed in this thread to set it for two drives and it dd not make any difference. I have tried to TFTP, but it never changes the boot sequence, no matter when I hit the "function" button and never seems to hit the server. What I have NOT tried is anything with a USB. Is there anything I can do with a USB to get me up and running? Any other suggestions? Would like to get the thing going, but it has been a challenge.
Thanks, Todd
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: eugrus February 05, 2023, 05:24:36 PM
If I prefer a clean Debian installation to a blank drive inside of LS-WXL and just make the files from http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/bullseye/main/installer-armel/current/images/kirkwood/network-console/buffalo/ls-wxl/ available on a TFTP server at 192.168.11.1, will the LS-WXL be able to boot into the installer and let me reconnect to it via normal LAN and ssh into it with the installer:install name and password?

"Option 3" on https://github.com/1000001101000/Debian_on_Buffalo/wiki/Preparing-Device-for-Debian-Install so to say.

Or is this option not available for LS-WXL an I would have to reinstall the stock firmware first and use the acp_commander?
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 February 05, 2023, 10:01:46 PM
TFTP for debian install will only work if the device has access to the internet as well as the TFTP server. Really all 3 options require internet access but people often setup TFTP through a direct connection to a PC which doesn’t work if it doesn’t also provide dhcp etc.

You may have better luck with my installer images rather than the ones hosted by Debian since I have a few additional bug fixes etc:
https://github.com/1000001101000/Debian_on_Buffalo/tree/master/Bullseye/installer_images/armel_devices
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: eugrus February 06, 2023, 03:06:56 AM
TFTP for debian install will only work if the device has access to the internet as well as the TFTP server. Really all 3 options require internet access but people often setup TFTP through a direct connection to a PC which doesn’t work if it doesn’t also provide dhcp etc.

You don't mean that there should be Internet available from the 192.168.11.0 subnet, do you?

direct connection to a PC

Certainly wasn't plaining to do that:

My understanding is that once u-boot loads the initrd, the bootstrap system gets an IP via DHCP.

So my plan was to just set the 192.168.11.1 IP on my laptop with TFTP server, let the initrd load, then set the laptop back to DHCP and ssh into the installer. All while the laptop and the NAS still connected to the same switch as the router.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 February 06, 2023, 06:39:14 AM
Sounds like a configuration that could work.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: apple2k February 19, 2023, 11:10:29 AM
Hi all, I was given a TS-QVH12TL/R6.  It had 4 1TB drives in it.  When it was 'retired' it was mentioned that it worked.  When I received it, and try to boot up, and drive 2 would make a noticeable grinding noise..  It goes thru its paces trying to boot.. (Please wait, initialize USB, DRAM test, initialize HDDs) It would just stay in 'TeraStation initialing from HDDs.  after a 3-4 minutes, LCD would say 'POST ERR: 0401' and red error light is lit and LCD screen would read 'TeraStation Boot from HDD0' and just stay there. Upper left of NAS is a power button that would constantly blink in green.  Next to the Error light is the LAN1 light with flashes intermittently.  (Yes, I have LAN cable attached to LAN1 port in back)   
I downloaded NAS Navigator2 from Buffalo site but nothing shows up. My router is at IP 192.168.1.1.  I have no idea what the IP addy is for the NAS.

Can anyone provide assistance to get this NAS to boot up?  I DON'T CARE about retaining any info on the existing drives.. just getting this NAS booted back up and starting from scratch.   

Does anyone have a USB recovery/initialization for this NAS?  Anything to move to reinstalling firmware so I can revive this NAS.  Buffalo support is of no help indicating I should try this forum and TFTP.   Any assistance would be appreciated!   
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: apple2k February 19, 2023, 02:30:08 PM
A bit more detail regarding my attempt to reloading firmware on to my TS-QVH12TL/R6 NAS:

Since there was that drive noise in bay 2 of the NAS, I replace that drive with a 640gb spare drive as I did not have a spare 1tb drive.I have and upon hitting the reset button and the On/Off button, the POST error did not appear or the ERROR light being lit.  I don't know if there is a requirement that all the drives need to be the same size or not.

I have also read somewhere on the forums that says I need to remove all partitions when trying to reinstalling drives / firmware..

I have also tried to put a laptop, separate router (not attached to internet), and the NAS all on the same subnet (192.168.11.x) and the NAS Navigator2 was unable to find the NAS.

People in the know, please chime in with answers to my questions and if all possible provide me with a USB recovery / initialized flash drive (or ISO image) to have it boot off USB..  I can at least get to the point to have the NAS boot up and show up in NAS Navigator2 and assign it an IP address in the same subnet as my home LAN.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: davo February 20, 2023, 03:09:15 AM
If you can already get it visible in the NAS Navigator then it's probably in emergency mode in which case you just reinstall the firmware. You don't need the boot image if this is the case.
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: 1000001101000 February 20, 2023, 09:56:32 AM
The links to everything you need are at the beginning of this thread/post.

Specifically, this procedure to make a recovery disk:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Create_Recovery_Disk_for_Intel-based_Terastation

and this process to perform a new firmware install:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Restoring_Stock_Firmware_without_TFTP
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Eastmarch April 26, 2023, 05:41:59 PM
It's nice that the latest units have this all just built in. It's a testament to the solidity of the units that we still have people wanting to use 10 year old boxes, but I'd bet you can find a TS3000 Chassis pretty cheap and those just make you push a button, and those are only 8 years old or so :)
: Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
: Kev October 06, 2023, 08:27:23 AM
I have managed to successfully add 2x 8TB Drives to my WXL LS420 R1.

It required me taking a partition image (the ~900m boot partition) of one of my old 2TB drives - Restoring this to one new 8TB drive. (I used AOEMI)

Adding both 8TB disks to the unit, booting to EM, running luspdater and flashing 1.75. allowing the firmware to do something then... Flashing Red LED (6x).
I then connected my the same 8TB drive to my laptop again, destroyed all partitions and restored the boot image off the 2TB once again.

I then booted the unit and it successfully rebuilt the boot and storage partitions - It was restored to defaults - Japanese console - I then wiped and rebuilt a raid1 array - Happy (long) days!
Thanks for all the notes documented on this!