NAS542: HDD issues, but RAID status "healthy"

Thanks for your reply.

Ok, to give better context, the SMART values from the "faulty" drive are:

I've tried to follow one of your posts for running e2fsck, but I guess I did not do something right, I wasn't allowed to run e2fsck anyways. I followed your post here from Oct 28 2019:

I checked this, the reply was 0 (no HW issues, I hope):

cat /sys/block/md2/md/mismatch_cnt

I did the setup for e2fsck:

cp /usr/sbin/e2fsck /sbin/
cp -a /usr/lib/libext2fs.so* /lib/
cp -a /usr/lib/libcom_err.so* /lib/
cp -a /usr/lib/libpthread.so* /lib/
cp -a /usr/lib/libe2p.so* /lib/
touch /tmp/wait

vi /etc/init.d/rc.shutdown

#inserted the 5 lines below just above "mdadm -Ss"

telnetd
while [ -f /tmp/wait ]
do
    sleep 5
done

then rebooted (reboot command), waited for the NAS to start up (beep) and logged in over ssh as root.

Then, I still got a message

e2fsck 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014)
/dev/md2 is in use.
e2fsck: Cannot continue, aborting.

When I checked the rc.shutdown file, it no longer had the 5 lines inserted above mdadm -Ss, it must have gotten overwriten on reboot.

I then tried to repeat the steps and shut down the box using the power button, but it failed to shut down (during this time, I was unable to log in over ssh, connection refused), so after about 15 minutes I pressed the power button long enough for 2 beeps. Then, after booting up, it again had the 5 lines missing in the rc.shutdown file.

The same result (with md2 being mounted and the 5 lines ignored/deleted) happens when I shut down the NAS from web interface.

All the disks (the second one is the one with fs errors) read similar values, I'd say. They are not special NAS/RAID drives, just regular storage HDDs. All of them are the exact same model, though, ST8000DM004.

Ah, then I misunderstood the old thread.

Anyway, after allowing telnet in UPnP settings, I am still unable to login over telnet, getting "connection failed" error. When I run the rc.shutdown script, it indeed does hang, but returns a lot of errors in the process:

I am not able to get it to hang when shutting down from webinterface, using ssh reboot command, or by pressing the power button on the box.

Now the box is hanging (in the infinite loop), but I get

I did set up the UPnP telnet connection to port 23. When the box is running, I can connect over telnet just fine.

Ah, I messed up, I did instert the 5 lines, but without the spacing before the sleep. Now I was able to make the NAS hang mid-shutdown with telnet daemon active, but nevertheless, I got errors that it cannot unmount logical drives in use:

Now, when I try to run e2fsck, I still get a message that md2 is in use, unfortunately.

Thank you for being patient with me! I've started e2fsck on /dev/dm-2 that was listed among the errors in Tweaks and now it runs.

Thank you so much for your help, will report back once it finishes.

Edit:

So, I managed to run it, ran it a few times with the -y flag so that I don't have to click yes to repairing every inode. However, it runs for about 10 minutes and then it says "aborted". No other message that would explain why. When I run it again, it does sometimes pop up other inodes (different numbers than last time), sometimes nothing. I am not certain it is continuing from where it left off, seems to me it might just run out of memory at some point and crash. Is there a way to help it run all the way?

I found a similar question on Superuser https://superuser.com/questions/1248832/cant-run-fsck-e2fsck-aborted , where the solution was to create a config file for e2fsck

and then update e2fsck from sourceforge. I connected a 64 GB USB stick to the NAS, created a cache/e2fsck file on it

and linked it into the e2fsck.conf.

However, this results in the error above, e2fsck probably cannot access the external storage?

I didn't succeed in the second step either, command

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/e2fsprogs/e2fsprogs/v1.47.0/e2fsprogs-1.47.0.tar.gz

results in an error

I tried to do this, allocated a 12GB swap file on the exFAT USB stick, but got an error on the last command:

I'm reformatting the USB stick to ext4 to see it that helps.

Edit: Yes, ext4 is accepted by the swapon command, exFAT is not. Running the e2fsck command again, hopefully it will continue for more than 15 minutes.

..but, even with a swapfile like this (taken after 1 round of e2fsck, it seems to use only 33MB of it)

I still get the same memory allocation error after about 15 minutes of e2fsck running

(I did modify the config file so that it corresponds to the different hex code of the usb stick after formatting and reconnecting):

Edit2:

If this doesn't work, would running a loop on the e2fsck maybe help run it all the way? It always seems to fix something, maybe running it enough times could fix it all? Or will it need lots of memory even when there is nothing to repair? I'm thinking of maybe something like:

counter = 0
while [ $counter -lt 100]
do
e2fsck -y /dev/dm-2
let counter=counter+1
done

Is this syntax correct, and how would I go about running it on the NAS (as a superuser I suppose)?