LS-WXL, 500GB. RAID 1 - replacement hdd still shows as degraded.

[silverman166]

Please bear with me, as I am an elderly, not fully computer literate, newbie.


On investigating a fault, I found that one of the two 500gb discs in my ageing NAS, both Samsung HD502hi, was permanently lit up by a red light, so that disc was removed and replaced by a Western Digital 1Tb NAS hdd, after switching off the NAS. This hdd is one of two which I bought together which were stated as having been used in a NAS, data wiped and ready to go, and had 100% Health showing on hdsentinel with 1000 days remaining.

After switching on, the red light is still showing and the nas is also still indicating that it is in a degraded condition, both via the NAS info lights blinking 1,2 and after some delay via a message on my laptop from the NAS itself, via NAS NAV 2. I had been advised that it would be ok to utilise a larger capacity drive with the 'good' 500gb.

Is there some way for me to rescue this situation, has my approach been too simplistic, or is the NAS now defunct? Hopefully the latter will not be the case and worst case scenario would be to start backing up from scratch with both 1Tb hdds.

[silverman166]

I've now removed the 500gb 'good' drive which hopefully has all my data on it, and replaced it with another WD Red 1tb hdd, so that I now have two 'clean' identical drives in the NAS, intending to just do another full backup from scratch.

However, when I switched on, I received what I interpreted as error E06 (6 quick-repeating red flashes on the NAS), and the 'NAS drive cannot be found' message appeared on my laptop after trying to access via NasNAvi2, so I can't even set up the NAS with these other drives.

Following the User Manual trouble shooting guide, disabling temporarily the firewall and changing ethernet port and cable made no difference.

PLEASE- any suggestions to resolve this would be most appreciated.

Thanks.

[Kane88]

I've now removed the 500gb 'good' drive which hopefully has all my data on it, and replaced it with another WD Red 1tb hdd, so that I now have two 'clean' identical drives in the NAS, intending to just do another full backup from scratch.

However, when I switched on, I received what I interpreted as error E06 (6 quick-repeating red flashes on the NAS), and the 'NAS drive cannot be found' message appeared on my laptop after trying to access via NasNAvi2, so I can't even set up the NAS with these other drives.

Following the User Manual trouble shooting guide, disabling temporarily the firewall and changing ethernet port and cable made no difference.

PLEASE- any suggestions to resolve this would be most appreciated.

Thanks.

The reason it is showing degraded, is the array has to be rebuilt with the replacement drive.  You have to do this via the buffalo LS-WXL web console.  You'll have to pull up the manual for the LS-WXL, for how to rebuild the array via the admin web page on your NAS

Since you are using RAID 1, you cannot increase the ARRAY size from 500gb to 1tb with the rebuild.  You CAN rebuild the array using the 1tb disk, but the array size will still remain 500gb.

To make the array a full 1tb with the two 1tb disks: you have to delete the array and recreate it with the two one terabyte drives, so that the full 1tb is available.  Do not do that right now.

It looks like you are using the older LS-WXL linkstation.  And you are using it as a backup device. 
If so, you need to put the good working 500gb disk back in. (It sounds like the 500gb was in the first slot, so back into the first slot it should go.)  Then put the 1tb drive in the slot where the failed drive was at. 

Next I would suggest rebuilding in the array, before you back up the linkstation data.  This way the data is still fault tolerant.  You do this via the LS-WXL web console.

Then, back up the data to another disk like a USB HDD or something else.  You cannot backup the data to one of the disks that you want to use in the linkstation.  Linkstation drives have to be completely blank so they can be formatted by the linkstation itself.


As for the blinking with the 'red' drive: 
That is happening because the NAS cannot find the firmware on the new blank drive.  You can't just put drives into these units and expect it to power on and boot up and work.  There is firmware on the drive that contains the boot up sequence.  Without the firmware on the new drives, the NAS will not boot.

If you really want to rebuild the unit with two 1tb drives for more storage space, you have to reload the firmware from scratch.  You will have to do TFTP to make that happen with two blank hard drives.  I've not done it with a LS-WXL linkstation before, but my method should work.  You can search the forum for my TFTP guide, it tells the steps for how to rebuild the linkstation from scratch, with your two blank 1tb drives.

TFTP requires boot files and the TFTP app.  You'd need to contact buffalo support to get the necessary files for your unit.