HS-DH1000GL FW 2.21 Powers off and beeps

[rcrodgers]

   

I found these two threads which mention similar behavior but didn't find a solid resolution to the problem:

Unwanted shutdown Linkstation Live

Linkstation Live HS-DH500GL Beeping

 

I updated my Linkstation last week after discovering that firmware 2.21 had been released. I had been using the firmware released last year in January to address the PS3 compatibility (version 2.11 I believe) until then, and I never encountered this problem before updating to 2.21. Since updating, I've encountered this problem only a few times and always randomly.

 

The reason I'm posting here is because my experience with this problem seems to be a bit different than the two I referenced. My Linkstation has been in an area with decent air flow, and hasn't changed locations since I've owned it (nearly 2 years). While it's on a desk, it's within a few feet of a window that I've had open all weekend, and yet the problem has occurred both in the middle of the day when it's been warm and humid, as well as in the middle of the night when it was cold and less humid. The fan seems to be working properly, and I even opened it up and blew dust out of it and any airflow channels with a can of compressed air. The device is connected to a UPS that has line conditioning circuitry, so I don't believe that it's happening due to a brown out or minor surge.

 

Naturally since the device is powering down, I can't access the web interface to find out what the beeping is indicating, and even if I had it configured to email problem reports, my ISP (Comcast :() requires a more complicated means of sending email through their servers than the Linkstation configuration allows. The beeping is a constant, regular beeping without any pattern beyond being equally spaced. It doesn't stop or break until I press the power button once. I can then turn the Linkstation back on and use in normally for hours, but the problem always seems to occur when I'm either out of the room or asleep, but it hasn't occurred frequently: only 3-4 times since Wednesday of last week.

 

Any ideas?

 

[rcrodgers]

   

New information! I decided to try to force the update through again, as I've done in the past, to make sure that the update was successful, but after I enter the admin password for my unit, nothing appears to happen. The update and find buttons in the updater app become grayed out, but no progress bar or other indication of the update process appears. After a while, whether I quit the app via the quit button (which remained available) or not, the drive apparently switches over to EM mode, and shuts off with the continuous beeping I mentioned earlier. I'm not sure if the switch to EM mode only occurs due to the update attempt, if it is the problem causing the shut off, or if it's coincidental.

(Edit) I just confirmed that the device drops in to EM mode prior to shutting off and beeping even without attempting to do a firmware forced update.

(Edit 2) I just put the Linkstation in EM mode intentionally and tried to update the firmware. Although the LSUpdater app can find the drive prior to clicking the update button, after clicking it and entering the admin password, it searches for the device and "can't confirm a response" from it. So I'm going to have to guess that updating successfully it is out of the question.

(Edit 3) Another interesting thing is that it changes its name to "©Å¾Tû" when going into EM mode. It always returns to its normal default BuffaloTech provided name when I restart it however, so this definitely seems like at least partially corrupted firmware to me. Any answers anyone?

[rcrodgers]

Ok... I've now waited two months on this thread and for a response from Buffalo's tech support for an answer on this, and my drive has been sitting turned off and pretty close to unusable. Is there anyone else out there having a similar experience with this after updating to the 2.21 firmware?

[Blexley]

FW 2.21 May need to be pulled. ?

 

http://forums.buffalotech.com/t5/Storage/FW-2-21-May-need-to-be-pulled/td-p/30409

 

They don't seem to be intrested :(

[tanjl]

try downgrading to 1.15 to see if same problem occurs..

[Blexley]

If yo read the link to the thread i posted above there is a problem that loads of people have with Firmware 2.21 that locks the Linkstations up so they no longer work with any version of the LS-Updater.

[rcrodgers]

 

Blexley wrote:

FW 2.21 May need to be pulled. ?

 

http://forums.buffalotech.com/t5/Storage/FW-2-21-May-need-to-be-pulled/td-p/30409

 

They don't seem to be intrested :(

Thanks for the link! Yeah, I haven't been able to get the LSUpdater to work, so I'll see if I can figure out how to login via telnet and hopefully kill the media player(s). If that does the trick, then I'll be satisfied as long as I can use my drive until the next FW update comes out. And at that time, I'll wait even longer before updating to see if people have problems with it.

 

[rcrodgers]

 

rcrodgers wrote:

 

Thanks for the link! Yeah, I haven't been able to get the LSUpdater to work, so I'll see if I can figure out how to login via telnet and hopefully kill the media player(s). If that does the trick, then I'll be satisfied as long as I can use my drive until the next FW update comes out. And at that time, I'll wait even longer before updating to see if people have problems with it.

 

 

Well, I found a way and tool to allow me to telnet into the drive, theoretically, but apparently too many of the on-board scripts are either missing or corrupted because I was not able to successfully telnet into the drive. (I'm sure that the tool didn't cause any problems because even before I found the tool, I wasn't able to access the Maintenance or System Status pages within the drive, they always error out advising me to contact the drive's administrator: me.) The tool would let me put the drive into EM mode at will, which allowed the drive to stay on for hours without the incessent beeping, but my data was inaccessible. Rebooting into normal mode, my data was accessible for as long as the drive was stable (a few minutes typically) before shutting itself down and beeping.

 

When I last was able to get a response from Buffalo regarding this issue, they implied that if my drive was under warranty (which it hasn't been for a year), then I'd be able to send it in for repairs, but when I mentioned that it wasn't I never got another response from them even though I explicitly asked how much the repair cost would be. I just sent them another support request mentioning the other two trouble tickets and this thread, and we'll see how far I get this time...

 

 

[rcrodgers]

Ok, I've got my LinkStation back on FirmWare 2.11 and after a couple hours, I haven't had any of the power off & beeping problems.

 

Here's the solution for those of you that wish to try it yourselves. I'd only recommend doing this if your drive is already out of warranty, and you're comfortable with a screwdrivers and electronics, and are familiar enough with your computer to install a new hard drive. The critical part of these instructions rely on the ability to connect the SATA drive inside your LinkStation to your computer, either directly through SATA cable & power cable, or in another external SATA drive enclosure.

 

1. Power off the drive and unplug both the ethernet  and power cables.
2. Remove the screws at the top and bottom on the back of the device case. You should be able to slide the side panel off now.
3. On the bottom of the drive, at the front is another screw, remove it. You should be able to tilt the front panel off from the bottom, pivoting on a catch at the top.
4. Looking at the insides from the front, you should see a circuit board with four screws. Remove the outer-most pair of screws; they're the ones attached to the silver/gray metal, not the ones touching the circuit board directly. Once these two screws have been removed, you should be able to slide the drive out of the primary housing. Set the housing aside.
5. There are two more screws attaching the SATA adapter and mounting to the drive, remove those and set the adapter/mounting aside.
6. At this point you need to connect the drive to your computer. If you have a USB-SATA drive enclosure handy, it's easier to install the drive into it than to open your computer and install it in there. Either way, you'll need to know what you're doing at this step, and the next few steps are fairly critical and dangerous. Only do this if you really know what you're doing!
7. Once the drive is attached to your computer, you have a few more choices. If you're familiar with Linux, you can probably boot up your favorite distribution of Linux and copy or backup your data on the drive. If you're not familiar with Linux, I highly recommend that you find a nearby Linux users group and ask them to help you back up your data on the drive. The drive is formatted with the XFS file system which is included in some of the more popular Linux distributions, and I had zero problems just accessing the data to copy it to another drive at this point with Fedora 13.
8. Once you've backed up your data, or if you don't care about it or the drive is empty, the simplest thing you can do is to delete the partitions on the drive. Again, this will cause data loss, so be sure you're fine with losing whatever is on the drive. If you like, instead of just deleting the partitions, you can wipe the drive with something like Darik's Boot and Nuke (http://www.dban.org ), though that's not necessary and it is time consuming.
9. Reverse steps 1 through 6 to return the drive to the LinkStation enclosure.
10. If you haven't already, download the appropriate TFTP software for your drive and the firmware of your choice. Since we're pretty much all using LinkStations, and the current firmware is 2.21, I highly recommend against using that version. At the moment, it looks like Buffalo finally listened to those of us that have had problems, and pulled 2.21. The current version listed for my 1 TB LinkStation Live is listed as 2.10, but 2.11 worked fine for me before 2.21 and it works fine for me now after I performed these steps. The link and the TFTP procedure can be found here: http://forums.buffalotech.com/t5/Storage/FAQ-3-of-4-TFTP-boot-procedure-please-read-this/td-p/11015 .
11. Connect your LinkStation's ethernet cable directly to your computer, and set your computer's IP address to 192.168.11.1, then start the "TFTP Boot.exe" program under Windows. (I assume there's a Mac version as well, but I don't have the instructions or familiarity with Linux to tell you how to do this from there.)
12. Turn on your LinkStation. It will initially start booting normally, but after a few seconds will give a musical error tone, and the error light will start blinking. It will continue to start up, however, and should eventually download the necessary boot instructions from the TFTP server. Check the TFTP server's window to make sure that you see that client 192.168.11.150 has downloaded some data.
13. Wait about 1-2 minutes to make sure that the LinkStation has finished booting into it's EM mode, then start the firmware updater. It should find the drive fairly quickly, and the firmware version should be blank or "--". Click the Update button. At that point, it will tell you that the drive doesn't appear to be formatted, and it will ask you if you want to format the drive. Choose to format the drive, and get past any warning messages it gives you. In a few moments, the updater should begin formatting the drive, then transferring the firmware like it would normally do during an update process.
14. When the drive is finished installing the firmware and rebooting, the drive will be back in straight from the factory condition if successful. Firmware 2.21 errored out on me the first time I did this, and I assume would have continued to error out on me if I had tried to continue with it. I recommend steering clear of 2.21 at all costs; I had to repeat this entire procedure again in order to get back to a point where I could install 2.11. (I wanted to give 2.21 one more chance to see if my original update experience with it had just been bad luck, but I ended up with the exact same behavior.) Don't forget to change the default user name and/or password!

[Dustrega]

As an after note I am required to state that this will, if not already, void the warranty of your Buffalo product.  Again, this is just a required statement but thank you for the very detailed walkthrough.