Starting from scratch - Firmware from nothing?

[voyager529]

Hey everyone!

Quick backstory: a friend of mine gave me a Terastation TS-RIX4.0TL/R5, with the disclaimer of "I can't get the firmware to load; if you can fix it, you can have it", keeping the existing disks for another project. So, I understand if the answer is "you're simply screwed", but it would be nice to have this handy device up and running in some capacity. The good news is that a solution involving "nuke it from orbit" (figuratively speaking, of course) is a perfectly acceptable set of procedures here.

I've installed a single disk for the purpose of initial configuration and acclamation to the system; I'm not looking to create a RAID at this juncture. However, while the manual indicates that a JBOD setup should be practical, it's unclear whether it will throw a temper tantrum if there isn't a disk in every slot. The disk is blanked out; there are no partitions on the drive.

I've attempted to run NAS Navigator, and it doesn't seem to see the Terastation. Presumably, this is acceptable, due to the implicit necessity of working firmware for that application to work. I have the ZIP file for the 1.65 firmware update. I've static IP'd my laptop and have an ethernet cable directly connecting the two of them, with a static IP in the same 169.254.x.y subnet. The firmware update utility sees the NAS, but when I attempt to flash it, I get the error "Partition not found. Aborting firmware update". I also tried loading the firmware blob on a USB flash drive and hope it would pick up; no dice there, either. The NAS will ping, but it doesn't telnet, SSH, or HTTP as far as I can tell. The manual doesn't seem to address this scenario; Google searches have brought me other forum posts like this one (http://forums.buffalotech.com/index.php?topic=22603.msg82311#msg82311), and others mentioning a "Kirkwood TFTP" application, which I had no success with, either - it camps out at "accepting requests", with no requests actually made, so it would seem. I also tried what was listed on this blog post (https://www.thekua.com/atwork/2013/02/fixing-my-buffalo-linkstation-live-ls-chl/comment-page-1/), but didn't get anywhere, and the "force firmware update" procedures didn't seem all that useful, either.

The LCD reads that it's in "Emergency Mode" with a red backlight, eventually turning a nifty magenta color. After some time, the fans power down entirely.

I greatly appreciate any and all available asistance with getting this NAS to work.

Joey

[davo]

It won't install with one disk only.

[voyager529]

I got it!!

I started with davo's advice and put three more drives into the NAS. No change.

What ended up working was to alter the TSUpdater.ini file as follows:

Code Select Expand


[Flags]
VersionCheck = 0
NoFormatting = 0
iSCSI = 1

[SpecialFlags]
Debug=1


This formatted the drives and forced the firmware to be uploaded. It did take a couple of attempts for the firmware flash to finally take; at one point it complained about the inability to make a TCP handshake...but the magical 'reset' button seemed to help aplenty in that regard.

Do note that the entire point of this exercise was to force a factory reset on this NAS, and had there been any data on the disks I cared about, I'd be screwed. If you're reading this, and you've gotten to this place by way of a NAS with actual data on it, I strongly recommend taking a desktop, a handful of SATA cables, and an Ubuntu disk out first, because this WILL completely wipe your drives...I happened to have been in a place where that was the goal.

Thanks, and I hope this helps someone.

Joey

[voyager529]

Bonus tip: My firmware flash was in Japanese. If you end up with the same issue, log in with the default credentials (admin/password). Choose the second button in the top, charcoal greyish header bar. Leave it at the first option in the light grey header beneath it, then expand the fourth maroon option bar. You'll be able to change the language to English from there.

Joey

PS to forum mods: Sweetcaptcha is amazing. Asking me to add the sum of square roots at 1:30AM is cruel and unusual punishment :-P

[Eastmarch]

It really confuses the bots. The question can't be Google-able.

I'll look at that package, it will have to be available for SMF.