I think tonight is the night when every piece of hardware I own breaks. Let me explain what's happening...
After a scare with the hard drive in my desktop (stopped working for a few hours) I decided I better do an emergency, impromptu backup to get everything up to date. This is where the problems with my DNS-321 started. I use my NAS for backups only, nothing else. The NAS isn't even turned on unless there's a backup happening.
I'm using two Western Digital Green drives in the NAS, 500 gigs each. I run them in RAID 1. I'm using Acronis True Image Home 2010 to do the backups, off a Windows 7 Pro system. Prior to tonight, I've never had a problem with the NAS.
I attempt to start the backup and it fails, saying there's an IO problem. I check the NAS and it still shows up (mapped to drive P) and I can see the old backup files. I notice one thing odd: One of the files (the full backup file, which should be about 188 gigs) is set to a file size of 0 for some reason. I was thinking maybe Acronis did this in the failed backup attempt. I decided to clear all the files off the NAS (since the incremental backup files are mostly useless without the big "main" file.) but Windows couldn't delete them. It spent about 5 minutes trying and returned an error that it couldn't access them.
So, I'm starting to freak out at this point. My backups are essentially gone. If my desktop HD fails again, I'm in big trouble. I decide to reformat the drive and hope that fixes the problems. I access the NAS and attempt to reformat the system (going through the RAID menu, picking RAID 1 and telling it to initialize and format) and it doesn't work. It just sits there saying, "RAID Configuration 0%" ... after a half hour of it not doing anything, I powercycle the NAS and try a second time. I let it sit there over an hour and it never changes from 0%. The blue lights on the front blink, but nothing happens.
As a mapped drive, the NAS is totally inaccessible from Windows now. I can still access the menus through a web browser, so the unit itself seems to still function. Does anyone have any idea what's wrong? Did both the drives in the NAS die somehow? (Seems unlikely but not impossible.) Any idea how to fix this?
I'm just freaking out here because I don't have backups right now, and there's no way to recover a lot of this stuff. I'm dumping some of it (the most important stuff) to Dropbox, but that's not really a feasible way to do backups. Any help here is greatly appreciated.
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Topic: DNS-321 not responding like it should (Read 3733 times)