Buffalo Support:
It's very rare that I do this, but I wanted to formally thank you for the support that you provided with my LS-W2.0TGL/R1.
I recently had a HD failure with the product. I called support and they immediately sent me a replacement drive. The drive looked at first to be for a Terastation. I called support up twice (Jeff was the gentlemen if I remember correctly) and was concerned about removing the drive from the bracket as it did have the sticker on it - your support specialist said not to worry, take the drive out of the bracket, and then install it in the LinkStation drive bracket and plug it in.
Sadly, I had already lost all data as the RAID array was set to RAID 0. I caused even more issues when I tried to connect the new drive and the LinkStation stated that the new drive had failed. I decided to use my techy background and hooked it up to my computer and saw that the drive did work.
Then, of course, I got even deeper and decided to delete all of the partition data on the other drive. Little did I know that the LinkStation actually installs a special partition that contains the boot code for the drive. For hours I scratched my head wondering if I had bricked my device...I was about ready to call customer support again....
Out of curiosity, I decided to search the Knowledgebase to see what options I had. After looking into it a bit, I saw that there was an "Engineering Mode" (EM) that was available for the LinkStation. I decided to go down that path to see if I could get the drive into a basic mode so that I could reflash the firmware and have the partitions reset. I ran into another roadblock - it didn't work and I was even more concerned.
I dug deeper, and then I discovered that there was a failsafe in which the NAS would actually do a TFTP request to a specific ip address and port. After reading the support article, it also pointed to the files in which I needed in order to get the connection to work.
I installed the files, fired up the TFTP server, and then followed the instructions (didn't direct connect but used a switch - I know enough where I felt safe as all the devices are on the same subnet). After a couple of seconds, I saw that the device had read the TFTP blocks and had started up in EM mode. I then read up on how to apply the firmware update and was surprised that there was a debug mode in which I could reset all partitions, clear the user data, and then force the update to occur.
After all of this, I crossed my fingers, had a scotch, and waited for the process to complete. The update succeeded, and I was able to connect to the device with the HTTP access that was the setup for the device. Both drives were recognized, and after changing the language and code pages from JIS to 439, I was able to re-configure the array to a RAID 1 array so that I could do backups and not have the fear of going through this entire process again.
It's rare, as I stated before, that I find such technical documentation from a vendor. Mind you, this probably isn't the best path for a consumer to go down, I was extremely pleased with the thoroughness that your staff has contributed to your website. It helped me to avoid a call with customer service as they have other issues to deal with, allowed me to learn something about the internal workings of the NAS (Linux - nice!), and made me overall happy as I didn't have to send the entire unit in for repair.
To all the support team and engineers that contributed to the design and fail-safe's - kudos to you!
Thank you again!
- Scott
You are Welcome Scott. It's nice to have a customer that takes it on themselves to do a little diagnosis and has the understanding to follow through with research and hard work when diagnosing their device. We are always trying to add information and give as many resources to our customers as possible. Thank you very much for taking the time to find these resources and implement them.