Author Topic: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives  (Read 76001 times)

ukdiveboy

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #75 on: April 30, 2021, 11:46:46 PM »
Maybe the GPT suggestion helped, or maybe I just needed to be more patient!

This time I partitioned with GPT.  I still created all 5 partitions (to match the old damaged drive).  I was still unable to use the web management UI to set-up the share drive on the NAS.  However, I was able to use the web management UI to "reset to factory defaults". 

When I reset the device back to factory defaults it spent over two days reformatting the harddrive.  This time I was able to monitor the progress through the web management UI.  According to the UI, It was writing 1s, then 0s then 1s again to the hard drive.  The LED on the front spent the whole two days blinking E22. 

Thanks for the suggestion!
Rik.

Start with partitionless disks with gpt.

My old german howto:
http://oxygen8.bplaced.net/E06.htm

oxygen8

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #76 on: May 03, 2021, 03:28:48 AM »
Again
The normal way is to start with a unpartitioned disk in gpt mode.


This is not nessesary or recommendet:
" I still created all 5 partitions "

dieten2000

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #77 on: October 28, 2021, 04:19:30 AM »
Hello, I have this issue with a Linkstation Mini LS-WSX and tried the steps described here.
But I am failing already in the first step with tftp.
Maybe someone can help.
I've two new blank disks. I set my laptop to IP 192.168.11.1/24 and directly connect to the LS with a patch cable. But in the tftp command window nothing is logged. The tftp listens on 192.168.11.1:69 but there is no request from the LS to be seen.

So my idea is, that the 192.168.11/24 simply is not the correct network for the Linkstation Mini.

1000001101000

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #78 on: November 02, 2021, 12:55:06 PM »
I'm reasonable sure it isn't an IP address issue for TFTP, I believe that model uses the same bootloader image as the ls-wxl which I know folks have don't via TFTP. The address has also been the same for a wide array of devices spanning a very long time.

I'm not a big fan of the TFTP process because it gets hard to troubleshoot like this. I typically go with the other option.

dieten2000

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #79 on: November 04, 2021, 10:50:59 AM »
Thank you. But I am a little helpless and stuck with my Linkstation Mini.
I don't see my LS-WSX in NAS Navigator or in TFTP neither in my network where it once worked (192.168.0.x/24) nor when I change network to 192.168.11.x/24). (I am on a Win 10 laptop.)
More worse, I cannot remember the IP address the LS once had, since it worked for years.

How to use the options described here or acp_commander without knowing the IP address?

Any help is appreciated.

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #80 on: November 04, 2021, 11:21:40 AM »
If the device is on the network this should detect it.
Quote
java -jar acp_commander.jar -f


It uses the same protocol as NasNavigator, if NN can't see it neither will acp_commander. It will only show up when you get at least to EM mode which can be achieved I've with TFTP or the other method I mentioned earlier.

For TFTP your PC needs to be 192.168.11.1 and you may need to adjust your PC's firewall to allow the standard TFTP ports to come in.

dieten2000

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #81 on: November 05, 2021, 06:13:43 AM »
Sorry, my LS will not show up when I connect with 192.168.11.1.
The red LED flashes 6 times upon switch on. When pressing the function key the red flash is ending and the linkstation logo flashes blue as if it would be booting. But this is infinite as well.

So it does not show up in 192.168.11.x/24 nor in 192.168.0.x/24 (my home network), neither with red flashing nor with blue flashing.
I think I am at no point in Emergency Mode. How to get there?

Another point: I have replaced with two brandnew HDDs at the same time (same manufacturer and type as before) and created GPT and quickformatted with NTFS. The reason for that was that I got Disk Errors a lot on one disk but I did not know which one. So I replaced both, as advised from Buffalo Support. While the disk errors got more and more and I switched off and on I remember that it then already disappeared from NAS Navigator.


« Last Edit: November 05, 2021, 06:28:41 AM by dieten2000 »

dieten2000

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #82 on: November 06, 2021, 10:58:12 AM »
Finally I got it.
Luckily yesterday I received from Buffalo boot files and documentation. All was exactly the same as described here. The only differences were the tftp boot files initrd.buffalo and uImage.buffalo. I am not fully sure since there was no error logging, but I assume that I simply had two wrong files.
Now my LS Mini is back to life with the brand new disks.

192.168.11.1/24 for the PC is correct.

Thank you.

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #83 on: November 06, 2021, 02:32:47 PM »
Cheers!

banichi

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #84 on: November 20, 2021, 10:44:08 PM »
I am glad to see this topic since I have been trying to bring my out-of-warranty LS220DE back to life after it has sat powered down for several years. I don't recall at this point what happened when I set it up initially, but right now it has two WD Red 3TB drives in it which are brand new and never used as far as I know. I originally bought the LS220DE without drives, and added the two it now has. I don't know if I ever got it working originally. NOW, I have some time and have tried several times to rehabilitate it without success. The trouble starts with the drive not shutting down when the switch on the back is turned off - I have to pull the power cable out to shut it off. I looked through the manual but found only an initialization procedure on page 91 which directed me to turn the Linkstation on while holding down the function button (the function LED starts flashing white) and then press the function button again. The LEDs start flashing white (both of them in the front) and the instructions say that initialization will take 5 to 10 minutes. This is where it becomes a further problem: 1) NAS Navigator2 never sees it, 2) the flashing LEDs never stop flashing, though I left it running for 2+ hours just to see if it would 'finish' itself. 3) The drive was still flashing when I tried to turn it off with the power switch on the back, and as before the power switch does not turn it off. I again had to pull the power cable out of the back to turn it off.

This looks to me like an internal electronic failure, but I don't know where to go from here, and since it is out-of-warranty I can't get any help from Buffalo. I would appreciate very much any guidance anyone can give me about this. At this point I am looking at recycling the drives and getting rid of the enclosure, but I would love it if someone could tell me a way to get it working again. 6TB of network storage would be great to have!
Thanks,
Michael

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #85 on: December 14, 2021, 04:26:45 PM »
@dumbbee

It sounds like you started with TFTP and couldn't make that work. There are various reasons that could be including firewall issues. I tend to avoid that method because it can be hard to troubleshoot but it does work for some people.

Later it sounds like you loaded the files the boot partition and successfully got it to boot (solid white led). That should mean you're successfully in EM mode.

If you're getting to EM mode you should see the device in LSUpdater. If you are not seeing it that could also be because a firewall/etc is blocking the UDP broadcast packets it uses to detect these devices.

For reference:
Solid White LED = successful boot (could be full FW, EM mode, Debian etc)
7 red blink LED   = Boot partition not found or invalid. Could mean missing drive, no partition #1, partition #1 too big, partition #1 not ext3 etc.
6 red blink LED  =  Boot partition readable but boot files missing or invalid
Flashing white LED = Device still trying to boot from disk/TFTP/etc




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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #86 on: December 16, 2021, 01:50:20 PM »
It has to be small for the bootloader to read it, 1GB should be good for that model.

I would think gparted would be fine. I usually use gdisk which which can protect you from some potential issues that gparted might not.

The files go into the "root" of the partition.

If you are copying the files to the disk there is no need for TFTP.

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #87 on: December 16, 2021, 07:58:28 PM »
What are the LEDs doing now?

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #88 on: December 17, 2021, 08:15:37 AM »
stay white == good. You shouldn't get 7xRED just from swapping files though (as far as i remember).

Id suggest doing the fw unpack/partition/format/copy from the command line and then post the full output. I can tell were things go wrong if you do that, otherwise I'm just guessing.

For the non-TFTP process I'd recommend connecting it to your normal network rather than directly to your PC. Maybe that way you can see if your router sees it even if your PC does not.
 


Jeff Patton

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Re: Reinstalling to an out-of warranty NAS with blank drives
« Reply #89 on: June 18, 2022, 04:53:49 PM »
Hello, I have a very small brain so I'm going to be asking a lot of dumb questions.
I'll start out with the background.
Model: TS-QVH12TL/R6
Do you have the uimage.buffalo and intrd.buffalo files: Yes
Have you tried following the directions: gods help me yes I'm trying
OS: Windows, but I know people who are at least somewhat familiar with Linux if I cannot figure it out myself on windows.

What steps have you done so far:
I read over https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Restoring_Stock_Firmware_via_TFTP
I downloaded tftpd64
step 3 says "Configure your PC to have IP address 192.168.11.1"


And that's where I'm stuck. tftpd64 has a dropdown with several options but none of them are that. Should I be setting my ethernet port's ipv4 settings to 192.168.11.1? Furthermore it says "configure it to server the boot files" but I haven't the first clue how to do that? *help* If someone could walk my dumb butt through doing this I'd be eternally grateful.