Problems recovering from a permanent "System EM Mode Booting..." message

[cmarslett]

   

Model: HS-DH1.0TGL/R5

Serial: 99883979300642

 

Upgraded some time in the past to 4 1 TB drives (I believe this model number implies a 1 TB TeraStation).

Running in RAID 5 mode with 2.8 TB.  About 2.8 TB of data on the drive.  I pulled the drives out and mounted them on an Ubuntu Linux system and saw the data partitions to have 15 GB free.  The third partition had less than 500 KB free, however and over 100 sets of what appeared to be log files.

 

I have a backup made about 3 weeks ago (and the Terastation has been down about 2 weeks).  I repaired the 2.8 TB RAID array on the Ubuntu system and backed up the results.  Everything looks good on the second backup including data not in the first backup, so I think I have no data loss.

 

I believe I had a power failure overnight while doing some heavy read/write activity on the drives, but I am not absolutely sure.  Perhaps the drive filled up before the power failure occured and all was idle.

 

I was getting the E04 error on every boot, I did some searching here and elsewhere on the net looking for a recovery mechanism and tried several.  The last one was to reformat the first two partitions (the first partition to EXT3 and the second to XFS, both RAID 5 - should that be just 5 copies of the same partition in each case?), downloaded the firmware update from support/downloads, copied the initrd.buffalo and uImage.buffalo to the EXT3 file system on the first partition.  The rest of the first partition I restored from a recovered copy I made (it was corrupted, but fsck was able to make itself happy).  The second partition was blank except for what tar extracted from hddrootfs.buffalo.updated following the instructions at http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Revive_your_arm9_box_from_scratch" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Revive_your_arm9_box_from_scratch had no reference to it.  It looks like a reasonable file system.

 

Anyone have an idea where to go from here?

 

I thought I would ask before going back and trying to make partitions 1, 2 and 5 non-RAID and try everyting all over....

 

Thanks for any help you might be able to give me!

 

--Charles

[JoshC]

You need to try a TFTP boot. 

[cmarslett]

   

I should have mentioned that I tried a TFTP boot, and all the comments I see say I should get mention of the two *.buffalo files on the TFTP server window in less than 2 minutes.

 

I have let it set for over an hour, and it is still working (the power button does nothing) after about 30 minutes, but by an hour, it will force a reboot.  No E04 error or anything on the display, though.

 

I tried it with a straight through cable between the Terastation and the computer as well a with both pluged into the same D-Link gigabit router.

 

The only thing I have not tried is to do a repartition, but I'm not sure how to do that.  Is there a thread somewhere here that explains the steps to do a complete revert to factory sequence?

[PCPiranha]

Next you want to troubleshoot for a bad HDD by shutting the unit down, removing disk one and turning it back on.  If it boots up HDD1 is bad, if it doesnt, shut the unit down, replace drive 1 and remove drive 2.  See if it boots.

 

Continue this until you find the bad drive (ie the one that the unit will boot up w/o)

[cmarslett]

   

I had not done this because I removed all 4 drives, installed them in an ESATA enclosure and recovered everything on the XFS data partition(s) and ran fsck on the EXT3 partition and the XFS specific check program on the XFS system partition.  It did not detect any errors, but I got a warning that the XFS system partition was critically full.  So all the drives seem to have no hardware errors.

 

I just finished doing it this morning, just in case the problem is more the bits on the drive rather than the actual drive hardware.  It fails almost exactly the same in the 4 3-drive cases.  I think there is a bit of difference in the way the lights flicker and in the time it takes, but the net effect is the same.

 

At this point I feel like I may have corrupted something important on the drive, perhaps by 'repairing' and fsck-ing the partitions on a non-Buffalo system or perhaps by reinstalling the contents of the two system partitions.

 

Is there a way to force a factory rebuild on the Pro-II?  Or a more 'assertive' TFTP boot?  I have seen some comments elsewhere about JTAG recovery, but I really don't want to do that.  I have never been all that good with any soldering tools!