NSA320 flashing sys light

jko

I have it set up with 2 disks as a single jbod. When booting up one of the disks would turn red and the sys light would keep flashing. If I take the left drive out it would boot fine. If I take the left drive out and put it to the right, and leave the left empty it would also boot. It seems like the data is there but It cannot boot from the drive. Is there a way to make it not boot from the drive? Or boot from the USB drive?
In the log I see 

• Cannot init applets: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/i-data/md0/.system'

Mijzelf

jko said:

Is this partition suppose to be ext4?

Depends. Both disks have a small partition, one is ext3, and contains parts of the firmware, the other is swap.

How can I recover the data on my disk?

You'll need to connect both disks simultaneously, and assemble the array:

mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2

(Where sda and sdb can be something different, of course.)

When that succeeds, you should be able to mount /dev/md0

jko

I only have 1 sata dock so I am unable to connect both disks simultaneously. Is it possible to fix the part that contains the firmware or make it boot without using that part (like from external USB)?

Mijzelf

The box doesn't actually boot from disk, it boots from internal flash memory. The firmware part on disk is just an 'overlay'. You can see that, if you remove both disks, the box still boots fine.

The problem seems to be that your left slot is broken, and keeps the box from booting. Or maybe it's the powersupply which can't deliver enough juice to spin up both disks? Does the box boot if you only remove the right disk?

Anyway,

Cannot init applets: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/i-data/md0/.system'

The box failed to assemble the array (of course, it has only one disk), and the applets are installed on the data volume, which is not there.

Without dirty tricks it's not possible to mount the data volume without having both disks connected. The filesystem spans over both disks.

jko

If I put one drive in, doesn't matter which side it will boot. If I put both disks in, the disk led for one of the drive will always turn red and it would not boot. So maybe one disk has some corruption so it fails during assemble, is there a way to repair it?

jko

I bought another dock so I was able to assemble the array and mount it. Now I just need to buy another drive big enough to copy the data over

Mijzelf

So nothing was wrong with the disks itself? Glad that you got an 'early warning' that you should always have a backup.

jko

The first time I tried to assemble it said resource is busy for one of the disk and I just had to run mdadm stop. I tried to put the disk back in the Nas, one of the hdd light is still red and won't boot so not sure if something is wrong with the disk. It might be something bad in the smaller partition.