Buffalo Forums

Hello All,

Have an old NAS / Current paperweight that I'm trying hard reset as the data is no longer needed, but we no longer have the password. We've already attempted the red button reset but that has done nothing, reached out to Buffalo Support and received the following:

QuoteUnfortunately, this model of Terastation does not have a password reset option outside of the one in the user interface while logged into the admin account. If the default password for the admin account password is not working and what it was changed too is not known there is no way to gain access to change the password as this is one of 3 legacy models that did not have an external reset as when they were manufactured security was the biggest concern and this feature was not included.

With there being no official reset procedure for this model and any kind of factory reset using the firmware updater needing the password to proceed there is no official way forward here.

While i cannot provide unofficial procedures you may find avenues to progress on the buffalo forums here; http://forums.buffalotech.com/index.php

We've totally run out of options and don't want to get rid of this thing. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm close to opening it up and looking for a CMOS battery haha.

As an update, i've tried to follow these steps, but the links at the bottom no longer function.

https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Extract_Boot_Files_from_Stock_Firmware

They seem to work for me, can you be more specific?

Well, this information is concerning. I have a Pro 8 (similar to the Pro 6 mentioned in this post) that I'm saving up to purchase drives for...it would be devastating if I got everything suited up and attempted to get it running again, only to discover that the PW is unknown with no way to reset...! I suppose I'll have to cross that bridge at some point.

Any password on that model is stored in the OS which lives on the drives. There's nothing like that to worry about if you're starting with blank drives.

The process for making the recovery disk should still work but requires some manual steps on a linux system. We can usually help if people get stuck as long as they provide details of what commands they run and what the output is etc.

As far as I know support will also sell you a recover image on sd card as well.

Wow, that's a relief. Yes, the unit will be getting zeroed drives and we will be starting from scratch.

So many different Terastations, so many different configurations and methods...it's becoming difficult to keep up.