Problems accessing Admin interface on TS4800D

[darkvalley]

I bought this NAS second hand about a year ago with its current set of discs, so I only needed to access the administrative panel and create a raid5 array. I never bothered creating a new usb boot disk, I just changed the admin password.

It was running on an older firmware version (3.00-0.05) which I wanted to upgrade some time ago, but it failed to do so when I tried via the admin interface. Several attempts failed. I can't remember the error message but it had something to do with the network and accessing the firmware server. While attempting to fix this I fiddled with the settings for the available http and https protocols in the admin interface, "accidentally" turning them off and thus losing the access I had. I know, stupid thing to do. :-[

I have since attempted to restore the NAS to factory standard by restoring the OS from the USB boot disk I got with the NAS. I've been through the restore-process twice, and this apparently works. After resetting the NAS to boot from HDD the NAS boots and I regain access to the existing share (raid5 on 8 discs) via SMB. I also find the NAS in NAS Navigator. However, I still cannot access the admin interface. The connection times out, so I never get to the admin interface screen where I can log in. So it looks like the settings for http/https-protocol support has not been restored, which is strange after a system restore is done.

I have since downloaded the latest firmware and the TSUpdater software and I have successfully updated the firmware with this program. The strange thing is that the password it accepted is my own. I expected the former owner to have used another password which ought to have been in use after a restore. This again suggests that the restore hasn't actually worked.

According to the manual, the only way to reset the password is to create a password initialization drive and booting the system using that, same as for the system restore I already did. The funny/stupid thing is that this requires access to the administration interface, which is what I need to restore, so I can't do that. Catch 22 I guess.

Is there a way to really reset the NAS to proper factory defaults without having access to the admin console? Is there a utility that allows editing of settings in the USB disc on a PC or something similar?