LinkStation Pro Duo won't boot after firmware upgrade failure

[cplai]

My LinkStation was stuck in the check RAID array loop for days. When I called in for help, I was told to upgrade the firmware. The upgrade software did not see the drive on the network at all. I guess it was never ready because it was still checking the RAID array. I turned the drive off and boot it up again. It started up okay. So I ran the firmware upgrade program. It ran with a dialog box that said transferring firmware file. After a few minutes, an alert came up and said the firmware file transfer failed. After that point, my drive could not boot any more.  The blue light flashes and the drive will spin up the discs for about 15 seconds, then the spinning stops and then spin up again.  That would repeat forever and the drive never comes up successfully after that.

Looks like the failed firmware upgrade has left my drive in a limbo. Since the drive will not startup anymore, the firmware upgrade program does not see the drive on network.  It won't come up and yet I cannot fix its firmware. Does it mean my RAID1 drive is hosed?  If this is a firmware problem, will I be able to unplug one of my disks and mount it on another computer to copy the contents to another disk?  Or do I need another working RAID1 enclosure to mount my disks?  I hope the data on my disks are still intact.  Any suggestion?

[davo]

1. Where is your backup?
2. What model?
3. What firmware?

[cplai]

I don't have a back up. Model # is LS-WV4.0TL/R1 and it was just 1 year old, I think the firmware was 1.62 when I tried to upgrade to 1.65.  I cannot verify now because the drive would not come up anymore.

[davo]

Put it into EM mode again and then reinstall the firmware, FYI: the latest version is 1.68, not 1.65 so i dont know where you got this from.

[cplai]

I went to http://www.buffalotech.com/support-and-downloads/downloads and typed in LS-WV4.0TL/R1.
The firmware available to MacOS for this model is 1.65. I just checked again now and it is still 1.65. It is possible that the webpage is not up to date.
I read about how to put the device into EM mode. Since the device is in a cyclic reboot, I cannot get to its web interface. Other instructions suggest holding the red RESET button on the device, but I cannot find the reset button on my device. There is only a function button at the back. I opened the front panel and there is no RESET button inside either.

[Eastmarch]

If there was a RAID check, most likely one of your drives is in bad shape.

If it was only one of them, you may be able to boot from a single drive if you had a mirror set.

If you are stuck, try booting to drive 1 and if that fails, booting to drive 2. If neither work, you may be in trouble. What error codes is it throwing.

If you CAN boot to one drive alone, immediately back up your data. We see this frequently, where there is a reliance on a mirror set to be the full level of fault tolerance for irreplaceable data, and that is a ticking time bomb.

I personally have a USB drive plugged into the back of my NAS and I run nightly backups to it. Short of my physical location having a problem (water leaks, fires, etc) I can survive a catastrophic loss of the NAS in the event that it happens (which it eventually will, no electronic device lasts forever, and you cannot predict failures)

It may not be a comfort to you should you experience data loss, but I believe this trend is the result of the explosion of data that average users retain and this kind of technology becoming more mainstream; out of the data centers and into the home, as it were. Backups that don't share any single point of failure have long been a standard in the IT space, but easy to overlook in a personal home setup.

I wish you luck.

[cplai]

I am hoping that I can bypass the dead LS enclosure and access the contents of the disks directly.
I connected one of the disks on a Linux machine using a USB dock.

% sudo fdisk -l
shows me the disk is readable.

I tried to mount the disk.
% sudo /dev/udb1 /tempDisk
The mount command says
mount: unknown filesystem type 'linux_raid_member'

If I could mount the disk and read its contents, then I could backup my contents before trying to reflash the firmware.
Any suggestions on how to mount part of a RAID1 configuration on linux?

[cplai]

To bring my problem to a closure, I ended up buying the UFS Explorer recovery tool. The software download with a trial license is free of charge. The software verified that my disks are still readable and all the data are still intact.  The trial license only lets me copy a few mega byte of data out from the recovery. I paid 99 Euro to get a license to copy all my data to a different disk.

So in summary, I didn't have a disk failure. The failure was caused by a corrupted firmware upgrade. Now the LinkStation is a brick with 2 perfectly working disks.  Buffalo has approved a RMA for me to replace the device.  Now that my data are recovered, I may try one last time to see if the device can be revived. Any suggestions are welcome.