Buffalo Forums

[Linkstation Pro Duo, "LS-WV2.0TL/R1", 1.65 firmware]

I've been reading through the forums for almost 4 hours, trying various recommendations.  I've tried various processes from third-party blogs.  I've looked at the FAQs and sticky posts.  So if I've missed something, please, publicly flog me and I'll take my lumps but I can't take it any more!

I'm absolutely stunned that this can be so difficult.

I'm simply trying to replace the 2 1TB drives with 2 new 3TB (Buffalo approved) drives.  I understand that means the OS needs to be manually loaded on the new drives, and that's what I've been trying to do.

I've mostly tried the steps recommended to download the TFTP server and then load the firmware that way.  I thought that was going to work, but my NAS blinks blue forever.

That means the IP address is incorrect or the firmware version is incorrect or a few other things.  But since there's conflicting information on just about every part of this process scattered through the forum, I don't know what to believe (crossover cable vs. standard cable, use this TFTP...no, use the other one (which is no longer online), hold in function...no, press it after it starts blinking, etc.)

I've already babbled for a long time, so I don't want to bore you with the entire sequence of events here, but I can if that's what's necessary.  But it seems like there's simply got to be a document written by Buffalo that says "if you have product XYZ, here's the entire process to follow." 

Right? 

Maybe that's silly, and I should cut my losses and trash this thing and go by the Synology box I was looking at in the first place?

Sorry for the frustration, just can't believe how long I've spent on this. 

Thanks in advance.


Scott

Assuming you have no data on the unit currently and that the original drives are still good, try booting with one original drive and one new drive. That should let you format the new drive. Then shut it down and replace the original drive with the other new drive. You should then be able to boot and format the other new drive, then create a new RAID array.

Thanks very much for the reply.  In the old days, on minicomputers, that's how I would have done it.  But when I called phone support a while back, they said this couldn't be done, so I never tried...

So, I have one of the old, good drives, and one of the new, larger capacity drives in place.  It booted just fine.

When I go to System --> Storage in the menus, I see the two disks.  The original disk shows "normal", and the new one shows "Error" as I would expect.  When I select that new disk, the "Format Disk" button grays out.  So then I tried to format the whole array volume since I didn't have anything I needed on it.

The new disk still shows "Error."  So then I scrolled down and deleted the RAID array, thinking maybe I needed to do that before I could format the new disk, but it still grays out the "Format Disk" button.

There's probably something stupid I'm missing, if you can guide me, I'd very much appreciate it.


Thanks,

Scott

Buffalo support?

Anybody?

Your help would be very much appreciated...


Scott

First, a big thank you to Texturtle for taking the time to reply initially.  Kind of sad that he's the best support I've ever gotten about Buffalo products, and it looks like he isn't even an employee.  Oh well.

But I solved my problem!

I just purchased a QNAP TS-251, and I'm absolutely thrilled!  It's everything I was hoping for when I went cheap and purchased the Buffalo initially instead.  It's capabilities are amazing, and it just works.  Wow.

Yes, I bought the Buffalo with drives instead of diskless with the OS in the unit, and so officially, I shouldn't complain.  But for there not to be any working solution to simply insert larger drives, much less a well-documented procedure by the manufacturer itself, with specific downloads instead of guessing, etc...well that's just crazy.

No help from phone support with this or the other two calls I placed in the past when trying to get WebAccess working (they could never figure it out, even after I did everything documented on the forum which they confirmed.)

Sorry, Buffalo, but subpar products combined with subpar support isn't a good long-term plan to stay in business - pretty soon even the cheapskates like me won't want to waste their time and energy.


Scott