Buffalo Forums

I recently bought a brand new Linkstation LS-QVL to store some files I have. I bought 4 brand new disks that I put into the machine and hopefully connected the device and expected the machine to work.. boy was I wrong.

NAS Navigator reports the system is in emergency mode. The forum told me I should install a new firmware. The PHP script that allows you to download the firmware first requires you to fill in a CAPTCHA, this is annoying, unnecessary and stupid but I guess I can get through that.

Then the script bugs out by not providing the total size of the file to be downloaded or the proper responses to continuation requests which means you have to sit around waiting for a download to finish without knowing exactly when that will be and if at any time the connection drops you have a broken file that cant be resumed. Did I mention that the file is 270 MB in size, I actually had to go to a friend with a better Internet connection to get the download to finish.

The updater in the firmware doesn't work out of the box (Of course, why would it). I had to Google to find an answer only to find a blog post of a guy that wrestled with the same problem:
http://commonmanrants.blogspot.nl/2014/01/buffalo-linkstation-partition-not-found.html

Ok, so I need to edit an ini file for the updater to go into some kind of debug mode where I can get it to install the OS properly. Great. This didn't work of course, the debug mode did not appear to exist. Some more googling and I found a different page that tells you you can turn the formatting option off in the ini file. That way it should overwrite the disks and install everything.

It did appear to work, the updater asked if I was ok with losing the non-existent data, I said yes and it started formatting the drives. Of course the formatting failed half way through. When I restarted the updater it provided me with a whole new error.

"Couldn't connect to TCP
Updating aborted"

and then:

"LS-QVL-EMADF returns an error. (0xFFFFFFFC)
Updating is aborted"

Googling didn't help me find an answer and I was out of ideas. Just out of curiosity I pressed the function button on the machine and it appeared to do some sort of disk check and then a reboot. After a minute or two the red led underneath the function button turned off. (BTW pressing this button is not part of the manual. What is part of the manual is setting a power button on the back to an 'on' position. There is no 'on' position, there is only an 'auto' and a 'manual' position)

The updater then reported that it could find no machines that required an update. The ever so slow navigator appears to be stuck on mapping the network drive for about 10 minutes and then mercifully finishes with no errors. The navigator now reports that the NAS works and the HDD is in RAID 0 mode. I can also get to a web interface, if only I knew the default account credentials..

PS, they are admin:password

Uhhh.... so I dont think this is a question, but ill relate what should be your experience...


Purchase LS-QVL/E Diskless Enclosure
Purchase 4 new unused unformatted HDD's no larger then 3TB
Read Quick Start Guide*, either understand the pictures only format or get horribly lost...

It seems you got horribly lost (cant blame you) :D

In short terms since the QSG is a rather long winded affair of a cave dwelling painting,
1: put drives in unit, power on
2: wait till solid power/function light, press function button once
3: function light should start flashing, walk away for 10Min~ sometimes longer
4: then when you come back it should be online and ready to use!

*the QSG on the website when you put in the M/N seems to not relate to the /E diskless unit, /facepalm, I hope the one that came with showed the disk instructions at least :(

I also noticed the manual is not on the website as well /epicfacepalm, but the link to the manual which contains the user/password should be on that CD, when you start the LinkNavi autorun program it should be a big link that says View Manual, then again, you didnt mention if it came with the document or CD :/