Can I simply remove a drive from my Linkstation Duo to see if it will boot?

[mikejpgelec]

Hi,

I have a Linkstation DUO. Navigator reported a problem so I thought I would restart it, now it does the endless blue flashing light thing.

If I take out the ethernet cable when it restarts, it will go into Emergency mode.

I have tried upgrading the firmware, to no avail.

I have a feeling it might just be one of the drives, so would taking a drive out and switching the NAS on be a good idea? It would either boot or not boot? (Perhaps.)
I believe its RAID 1, which will probably complicate my theory.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Kind regards,

Mike

[mikejpgelec]

After trying to update the firmware a few times, my NAS navigator was able to pick it up. I still cannot mount the drive but it does indicate that the latest firmware seemed to install.

Can I replace a disk at a time to see if it will come back online? My other option is to use something called mdadm in Linux, apparently.

Any further help is much appreciated.

[mikejpgelec]

Well, I was able to somehow boot into a live linux, mount the drive and recover the information I wanted.

So it looks like I will now set the drive up from scratch with two new hard drives.

Which I have no idea how to do as the boot information is on the previous drives.

[mikejpgelec]

It turns out after all that, I should probably just have swapped the drives with the new ones, one at a time.

As I had recovered what I wanted, I thought I would just experiment with my initial query.

The first drive did not boot but the other one did. I am now rebuilding the raid array...

To be clear, because I initially lost the NAS in navigator, I did not know if the problem was with one drive or both of them.

I thought I would continue to share, in case anyone finds my antics helpful. :)

[mikejpgelec]

Things still are not as they should be.

I have left it 'rebuilding raid array' for two nights and each time I have come in the morning, the device has switched itself off. I turn it on and the same amber code flashes up as if it is rebuilding the array again.

Perhaps its worth buying something else now?

[Eastmarch]

Rebuilds can take a really long time.

In the UI under the RAID Array, it should give you an estimated time remaining, depending on the model.

[mikejpgelec]

I don't know what was causing it to shut down each time but rebuilding the array did take a long time as you said.

I tried so many things over this time, I've kind of forgotten the exact steps I took but I did use the tftp method at one point too.

Once I was able to boot into the Drive and access the settings, I formatted everything and started from scratch.