Buffalo Forums

Hi,
I've owned my terastation TS-QVHLC44  for a few years and never had a problem. I have been running it with 4x2Tb drives with RAID5.

A few weeks ago, my TS  indicated a HD4 disk failure , the display turned red, and HD4 in the casing  was flashing red.
I hot swapped HD4 with another brand new identical HD.
While rebuilding the array, HD3 failed (the TS started emitting a siren-like sound). 

I stopped my TS and  restarted it.

Now the TS display is solid red. It doesnt show any error message (when I click on 'display" button, it shows only the network, link, etc. info).
HD3's LED in the casing is not red (as if it were properly functioning).
The new HD4 also appears to be functioning according to its LED color.
And I cannot connect anymore to the admin interface on my browser...

Can someone help me find a way to reconnect to the admin interface?

I'll probably end up buying another Bufalo NAS and try to recover as much data as possible. I just don't know how to do this (over the network? by connecting each of the four HDs directly to my computer). Can someone help me find a practical way to do so?

I've order another replacement HD for HD3, It should be with me within a few days... But I dont have much hope, since the array rebuild didnt complete... It looks unlikely I'll be able to recover my array.

I've never had to dig into this and I must admit I am kind of inexperienced, so any help  will really be helpful!

THank you
P

Additional drive failures during a RAID5 rebuild, That's a nightmare. If you're still hoping to recover data you may need professional data recovery.

I've seen people report losing the text on the LCD for this model before. In some cases leaving the device unplugged for a while clears it, for some others it came back mysteriously after doing a fresh firmware install. I'd say there's a decent chance it will start working again at some point.

The easiest way to get more information about what's going on at this point is hook a monitor to the front.

Another option would be to put a Ubuntu Live image on a USB stick and try booting that (usb boot switch on the back). You could then check out the SMART data for each drive and use mdadm to assess the RAID5 status.

There are plenty of ways to move forward but depend greatly on the details of how the disks and array are doing. All of them risk further endangering/destroying data.

THanks for your help !

THe text on the LCD is actually working fine. What I meant is that the unit doesnt show any error message (neither on the LCD, neither on the disk LEDs within the casing)... But somehow the display is showing red, which I dont know what it means...

I hooked a monitor on the front and the unit seems to stumble on the fact that the RAID array was not fully rebuilt.

I'd like to try and reboot on a USB stick as you suggest, but how can I find a recovery image for the TS-QVHLC44 ?

I've seen onlibne that I can make a recovery stick through the UI on my  browser, but unfortunately like I said, I cannot access the UI anymore... (when I type my NAS local IP addresss, the browser shows "Buffalo XXX Copyright 2002-2013, BUFFALO INC. All rights reserved. " where XXX is a spinning wheel that spins forever)

Surely there must be a link somehwere where I can download an image file?


MAny thanks !

I made a guide for making a recovery image:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Create_Recovery_Disk_for_Intel-based_Terastation

Support can usually sell you an official one as well.

THanks !
Following your instructions, I managed to find initrd-atom_d510.buffalo and vmlinuz-atom_d510.buffalo from the firmware, and I could  install xorriso on my MAC. But cant find a way to install grub2... How can I do that?
I have a piece of software called balenaEtcher. Is there a way I can use this app to make the bootable usb stick?

I have to say I find it kind of strange... I checked on buffalo's tech support pages. THey dont seem to be updated, there are broken links... THere seems to be no way to send a message to their support team (could only find phone numbers for Europe, I;ll try on monday... lets see if someone responds). Is the company going bust? Also I find it really upsetting that they would sell the iso files. In my view thee things should be made available to their customers. Of course, now that I cannot access my 6Tb of data, I am compelled to pay their price, but it will leave the taste of racketeering... Quite upset they make it so difficult.

I hate to say it, but if your goal is to still recover data from your RAID5 array which suffered a second disk failure while the first was rebuilding you don't have realistic options beyond engaging the help of someone with a lot of experience with software RAID on Linux and most likely need profession data recovery services. Reinstalling the firmware probably won't succeed because of the state of the array(s) and trying to so has lots of potential to make things worse.

As far as making a recovery disk goes...

There are probably somewhat simpler or more portable ways to make a recovery disk using some other boot loader/tool. All you need is to create a bootable USB disk that a PC (non EFI) can boot that supports loading and Linux kernel + initrd and sets the command line. Like with most of my work/guides for recovering the stock firmware that guide grew mainly out of the things I put together to create a Debian installer for these device and might not be the best solution for recovery disks. In particular, the Debian work somewhat assumes a target audience of someone who wants to run Linux and is at least open to booting Linux of their desktop/etc to do the work, I haven't put any effort into making it work natively on Windows/OSX.

The process from the guide should work by booting into an Ubuntu Live image or even a VM or similar, both of which I would expect to work on an Intel-based Mac. 

I think I mentioned this earlier, but you could also use a Ubuntu Live image to boot the Terastation. That would allow you to asses the state of the RAID/disks without making any modifications provided that you are careful and know what you're doing. You could also create a custom recovery disk right on the device that way.....though I wouldn't recommend that since a small typo could lead to writing it to one of your hard drives rather than the USB drive.

It looks like the problem might come from the TS hardware itself...

Here's what I've done in the past 2 days:

I finished the procedure to create a recovery USB stick (thanks for your clear guidance).
I  then booted the TS on the stick.
while  booting, the TS display turns red... The error LED on the front panel is on.
The four drives appear to be physically fine (green LEDs).

The TS is discoverable with NASNavigator. It has an IP address.

I activated telnet by using acp-commander.
Then I used telnet to access the TS's IP address as root without pw.
I could enter the  linux file system of the USB stick.
I could also see that all the four drives and their partition were identified, although not mounted.

I then tried to refresh the firmware with TSUpdater (the windows version)  and NoFormatting=1, with the debug toggle on
It seemed to work fine until I got the message "format failed Update aborted". And the TS display turned red.

THen I decided to remove all four drives and insert one fresh 2Tb drive in the TS (in bay 1). I tried to see if I could at least make it work with one drive.
I rebooted the TS on the USB stick. I accessed the machine through telnet and saw that the drive was recognized as a device (and unmounted). Then I used TSupdater. Same result as above ("format failed Update aborted" and  TS display turned red.). I retried TSupdater with NoFormating=0. Same result. This may be due to the fact that the TS requires four fresh drives for this procedure to work (doesnt work with only one drive)... (as seen onhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYUZ8VdcuFc&t=250s) 
I havent four fresh drives so I couldnt try it out.

My four initial drives appear to be physically working (we can see their partition if we connect them to a computer). THeir data may be corrupted but that's another issue.

In any case, independently from the drives, it looks like the TS  itself is not working properly and wont update the firmware.

At this stage,  I can only think about this way forward:
-get another NAS
-connect my four (initial) drives in a desktop computer casing and use RAID recovery software to try and recover the files and copy them to the new NAS (If one of the four drives is broken, maybe this could also work with  three drives out of the four)

What do you think? Is there something else I should think of?

THanks again for your advice !

A few things:

I know I keep repeating it, but if you have any intention to engage professional help you should probably do so before trying most of this.....there is no problem so bad you can't make it worse...

the firmware re-install failing on the existing drives isn't too surprising. It's pretty conservative about such things to prevent data loss.....though also frustrating since it's not very transparent about what it's doing or why it failed.

You are correct about it not installing the stock firmware to one drive. This series in particular seems to default to 4 drives as the minimum (even for 2-bay devices) unless something changed since the last time I looked. I've got notes on how to adjust that limit during the install process which should let you install to a single drive if you want:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Restoring_Stock_Firmware_without_TFTP

It definitely works for 2-drives I'm somewhat less sure about 1 drive.

If you have a PC with enough spare sata ports you could boot that PC into linux and inspect the array/filesystems from there. You could also try whatever software you have in mind.

You can also attach a monitor and keyboard and boot up a Debian Live USB image and troubleshoot right on the device:
https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/

You can do the same thing without the monitor/keyboard by booting into my Debian Installer image and then look at the arrays/drives/filesystems by connecting to it over ssh.
https://github.com/1000001101000/Debian_on_Intel_Terastations