TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Discussion on setting up QNAP NAS products.
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fedoralinux
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by fedoralinux »

ppuls wrote:I told you, that i sent mine in to qnap directly (netherlands) and i got it returned yesterday, with a repair-sheet saying "firmeware repair". I have just installed all the drives agian and am waiting for the boot process to complete now. Will give you notice, on the progress.
everything is working?
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jamesmoon
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by jamesmoon »

Yep - definitely the right firmware. Triple checked that prior to doing it (I've been working in IT for the past 10+ years so know how firmware upgrades can go wrong).
Arno Nühm
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by Arno Nühm »

Hi everybody,
i took the registration to tell you, how it wored out for my brand new 412 ;) After the setup + firmware update the nas became unreachable.

1) Download Iso as described here http://wiki.qnap.com/wiki/Firmware_Recovery
2) Don't burn to cd, download http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ instead and put it on an USB drive (stick, external hdd) (most LG drives getting errors and falling back to busybox, my LiteOn worked for me, but ethernet connection wasn't established)
3) Follow instructions _exactly_ as mentioned in 1) (LAN2 worked for me)
4) Voilà, your nas heart's beating again ;)

Hope it will work for you!
dms102
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by dms102 »

Ok similar things happened to me today and I managed to fix it after a few hours. QNAP have basically provided a duff file on their website for the latest firmware version. Here is what I did

1) Start by following the instructions on here http://wiki.qnap.com/wiki/Firmware_Recovery to recover the firmware. When you reboot your PC with the iso image it might come up with a few errors of devices not found, but you should get into a Dos Prompt type login at which point you then hook up your QNAP box to your PC via the LAN (use the second LAN port), reboot the NAS and your pc will then upload whatever is on the iso file onto your NAS. Then......

2) When I restarted the NAS box after this with all the disks in the correct order, the status lights flashed red/green for about 3 minutes, and then green solid for a minute or two, then flashy green for a few minutes and then the cycle would repeat....weird but just let it do this for now

3) Download this firmware http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?p=241561 which is the latest 3.6 beta version - the one that you've currently got that messed everything up is incomplete (something QNAP seem to have messed up on the website). Save this firmware down by clicking on the link for your QNAP box version (mine is 412) and burn it to a CD

4) Hookup your NAS box with the disks in it to your PC (booted into windows) via Ethernet port 1. Run QNAP Finder which should detect it (my PC assigned a weird local IP address to it). This step was a bit fiddly...i had to wait for the NAS box to go flashy green/red on the status light before my pc would detect it....just keep jamming the refresh button on Finder. ONCE YOU FIND IT, DO NOT LET QNAP FINDER CONFIGURE THE BOX....just hit no when it asks you, otherwise it will ask to initialise your disks and you will lose your data. Just hit no

5) With the box found it should appear in the QNAP Finder window.... click on it to highlight it, and click on Tools and Update Firmware, it will ask you for login and password (I used admin followed by my old password which somehow it seemed to remember despite losing its firmware). Choose the option to provide your own ISO file. Point it to the CD you have burnt with the 3.6 beta firmware on it, and it should popup with a box giving you the status of install etc (mine took about 10 minutes here to fully install...it stuck on 90pct when restarting the box for a while, but be patient it will get to 100 pct)

This should successfully restore everything.
Should now be in a working state and i found all my network shares, settings etc were same as before
jamesmoon
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by jamesmoon »

Thank you both very much for taking the time to post such detailed info and sharing your experiences. I've been able to try the process on my TS-412 again but repeatedly run into a problem at the last few steps. I follow to the letter the steps in http://wiki.qnap.com/wiki/Firmware_Recovery and get to the point where I've successfully used the recovery iso to prep my system for the firmware upgrade. Specifically, everything goes as described in the recovery guide up until Step 15 (using the first method). That is, once the iso had done it's thing I could see the NAS again on my network with a valid IP from my DHCP server, it also displayed the default NAS name (I forget exactly what that was now), but then when I shut it down, reinsert my drives and power back up to do the firmware update, Qnap Finder may or may not find it (I have to refresh many times) eventually it does locate it but it no longer has the default name or a valid IP and returns the name "uLinux" and IP of 0.0.0.0 instead. If I press on and try to update the firmware as stated in the Firmware Recovery guide I eventually get a "server failed to respond" message.

Any ideas? Anyone had this before? Am I doing something wrong? Do I just have to keep trying to update the firmware after Step 15 until eventually the server "responds" and starts the update?

I'm wondering if it's OK to not bother with the reboot and reinstall of HDD's and just try the firmware update prior to that step (that is immediately after Step 14). Then, if the update is successful, move on to Step 15. Does anyone know if that's likely to cause more problems?

Thank you again for any help/advice, it really is very much appreciated!
zol
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by zol »

fedoralinux wrote:did you guys installed the correct firmware?
i can imagine that when installing the incorrect firmware, the devices are mixed up

i have installed latest firmware on both qnap TS 212 en TS 112 succesfully.
Yes, we did, this is automatic update !

I've just receive a brand new TS-412 (only 6 days) !
jamesmoon
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by jamesmoon »

OK, so I've also been talking with qnap support as I've been trying to resolve this myself. They teamviewered in last night to try and manually replace the ulinux.conf with a default version to see if that would recover my data...but no luck. At this point I'm stuck with the only official option of reinitialising everything and starting over again. The data is not mission critical but represents a lot of time and effort and I would still really like to recover it. My system worked for a day or so after the auto update and then just lost it's sh-t on a reboot...I have no idea why and promise I didn't do anything other than reboot the system. This is really, really frustrating.

If I follow the steps in the Firmware Recovery wiki and as others have posted above, everything works well, the NAS beeps when it should indicating there's no hardware failure, it's just the last step where I shutdown, reinstall the drives and startup again - I get Qnap Finder showing "ulinux" "0.0.0.0" and if I try to update the firmware as per the steps via the finder it says something about "please intialise the system first to avoid firmware update failure or click Yes to continue" and of course, clicking Yes just results in an update failure after a while...

Is there anything else I can try? Anyone?

I've seen posts talking about reinitialising (formating) the system then attempting recovery of the data via third party tools - but this is very hit and miss and obviously a last resort...Is this all that's left to try?

Thanks...for anything!
gsing
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by gsing »

I also just bricked my qnap 412 with the latest firmware upgrade.

Same as jamesmoon, I went through all the steps on the firmware recovery wiki using vmware, which seemed to work, and I could see the box on the network, but as soon as I powered off, I shoved the disks back in and rebooted, it was no longer visible.

For a fleeting moment, I also saw in the qfinder, the 'uLinux 0.0.0.0' line, but then it went away. I can't connect at all.

This is really frustrating! Anyone know how to get through the last steps?

gsing
gsing
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by gsing »

gsing wrote:I also just bricked my qnap 412 with the latest firmware upgrade.

Same as jamesmoon, I went through all the steps on the firmware recovery wiki using vmware, which seemed to work, and I could see the box on the network, but as soon as I powered off, I shoved the disks back in and rebooted, it was no longer visible.

For a fleeting moment, I also saw in the qfinder, the 'uLinux 0.0.0.0' line, but then it went away. I can't connect at all.

This is really frustrating! Anyone know how to get through the last steps?

gsing
Update:

Well I fixed the issue tf. Hope this helps someone in a similar predicament. I didn't care so much about the cost of bricked h/w, as the loss of data! Luckily I got the NAS working again and recovered it all.

I booted the NAS without the disks in and managed to SSH to the NAS with the default admin/admin account using Putty from W7. Discovered it runs busybox embedded linux running on a DOM in it's own flash memory, independent of the disks. A qnap support guy remoted in via teamviewer to my w7 box, told me to hot-plug the drives in order, poked around with what looked like the auto startup scripts which failed, then manually mounted the drives with mdadm. Only 2 of the 4 drives could be mounted. He ran a few scripts, then rebooting presented the same issue - not able to register on the network, etc. So we rebooted without the drives, hot-plugged and SSHd back in. He manually mounted the drives again, and tried to recover the data from W7 using winscp. Winscp was able to browse the directory structure, but could not scp any files. Support guy concluded it was a h/w issue and gave up, suggesting I scan the drives using manufacturers scan software for errors (I guess via SATA cable on a PC, with a utility that understands ext4 - not sure how many customers know what to do there), and try re-inserting them - if that failed, contact my reseller for support, i.e send it back to the factory. i.e gave up.

I did not think it was h/w, I suspected a firmware fail. I did some poking around to see how I could recover the data. I could cd around the directory and managed to cat some files, so figured data was OK. Then found that busybox had symlinks for many tools, but these were not supported by the monolithic busybox exe. Stuff like scp and rsync, make, etc. I figured that was why winscp could browse but not copy files. As the drives were mounted, I poked around busybox for data copy utilites, and found FTP and tar. I went old school, installed FileZilla on my W7 box, tarred and FTPd the files from the NAS to my W7 HDD (had to open port 21 in the W7 firewall incoming rules). It worked! I was pretty happy at this point to get my data back, with only 2 working drives (in RAID 6)!

Then I tried what I suspected would work with mounted drives anyway - I downloaded the latest firmware (3.6.1 Build0302) from qnap support site, and used the qfinder to update the firmware again. Before it was failing at the 20% mark - which I assumed was when it tried to write the firmware down and errored due to lack of mounted volumes. But this time it worked. After rebooting it, it became visible on the network, and I was able to jump to the admin website for the NAS! All original settings, etc were recovered, all 4 drives back online, and I was able to browse my data from W7 network share.

The NAS is currently rebuilding the RAID 6 volume (50% after 12 hours) according to the NAS admin page. I guess the two drives that were offline are being synced or something. But everything seems to be restored now - the latest firmware was the trick and it works as before. Basically a firmware update bug by QNAP was the root cause.

gsing.
matt.in.to
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by matt.in.to »

I just went through the same thing last night, and I'm HOPING that it's working for me now. Found that I had to pull the disks, and then insert one to do the firmware update. Couldn't do it from the admin page though, I had to go through the QFinder as well.

I lost all of my data on the RAID 5 though. Also found an interesting bug: One of the drives I used as a replacement was fresh from an iomega NAS, that uses busybox too. Turns out that the fact that that was drive one caused the TS-412 to try and boot from THAT boot sector, rather than it's own. Weird...
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schumaku
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by schumaku »

matt.in.to wrote:Turns out that the fact that that was drive one caused the TS-412 to try and boot from THAT boot sector, rather than it's own. Weird...
The NAS does ot boot from a HDD at all. However, the RAID (used for system partitions and for the data partition) might fail or mislead that another partition is "newer".

Somewhat too late for you - but it is always a good advise to remove all existing partitions or a full init using the manufacturer tools on disks to ba added to the NAS.
gsing
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by gsing »

gsing wrote:
gsing wrote:I also just bricked my qnap 412 with the latest firmware upgrade.

Same as jamesmoon, I went through all the steps on the firmware recovery wiki using vmware, which seemed to work, and I could see the box on the network, but as soon as I powered off, I shoved the disks back in and rebooted, it was no longer visible.

For a fleeting moment, I also saw in the qfinder, the 'uLinux 0.0.0.0' line, but then it went away. I can't connect at all.

This is really frustrating! Anyone know how to get through the last steps?

gsing
Update:

Well I fixed the issue tf. Hope this helps someone in a similar predicament. I didn't care so much about the cost of bricked h/w, as the loss of data! Luckily I got the NAS working again and recovered it all.

I booted the NAS without the disks in and managed to SSH to the NAS with the default admin/admin account using Putty from W7. Discovered it runs busybox embedded linux running on a DOM in it's own flash memory, independent of the disks. A qnap support guy remoted in via teamviewer to my w7 box, told me to hot-plug the drives in order, poked around with what looked like the auto startup scripts which failed, then manually mounted the drives with mdadm. Only 2 of the 4 drives could be mounted. He ran a few scripts, then rebooting presented the same issue - not able to register on the network, etc. So we rebooted without the drives, hot-plugged and SSHd back in. He manually mounted the drives again, and tried to recover the data from W7 using winscp. Winscp was able to browse the directory structure, but could not scp any files. Support guy concluded it was a h/w issue and gave up, suggesting I scan the drives using manufacturers scan software for errors (I guess via SATA cable on a PC, with a utility that understands ext4 - not sure how many customers know what to do there), and try re-inserting them - if that failed, contact my reseller for support, i.e send it back to the factory. i.e gave up.

I did not think it was h/w, I suspected a firmware fail. I did some poking around to see how I could recover the data. I could cd around the directory and managed to cat some files, so figured data was OK. Then found that busybox had symlinks for many tools, but these were not supported by the monolithic busybox exe. Stuff like scp and rsync, make, etc. I figured that was why winscp could browse but not copy files. As the drives were mounted, I poked around busybox for data copy utilites, and found FTP and tar. I went old school, installed FileZilla on my W7 box, tarred and FTPd the files from the NAS to my W7 HDD (had to open port 21 in the W7 firewall incoming rules). It worked! I was pretty happy at this point to get my data back, with only 2 working drives (in RAID 6)!

Then I tried what I suspected would work with mounted drives anyway - I downloaded the latest firmware (3.6.1 Build0302) from qnap support site, and used the qfinder to update the firmware again. Before it was failing at the 20% mark - which I assumed was when it tried to write the firmware down and errored due to lack of mounted volumes. But this time it worked. After rebooting it, it became visible on the network, and I was able to jump to the admin website for the NAS! All original settings, etc were recovered, all 4 drives back online, and I was able to browse my data from W7 network share.

The NAS is currently rebuilding the RAID 6 volume (50% after 12 hours) according to the NAS admin page. I guess the two drives that were offline are being synced or something. But everything seems to be restored now - the latest firmware was the trick and it works as before. Basically a firmware update bug by QNAP was the root cause.

gsing.

Ok, well. Massive thunderstorm here, lightning knocked out the circuit breakers and my NAS. Yep, should have had a UPS. Oh well. Don't know what happened, but it did not come alive after reboot, and something was corrupted similar to my previous firmware issue. At least this time I have a semi recent backup. I booted with drives out, hot swapped them blah blah blah. Got an ssh session, manually ran the /etc/init.d/init_disk.sh start and it seems to give me back my data under /share/MD0_DATA ... however, nothing ever stuck after reboot. I messed around with various suggestions on mdadm --create , etc. At some point I think I screwed my disks. I can create the array but the mount fails with:

[/] # mount -t ext4 /dev/md0 /share/MD0_DATA
mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/md0,
missing codepage or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try
dmesg | tail or so

[/] # dmesg|tail
[ 9815.410000] disk 2, o:1, dev:sdc3
[ 9815.410000] disk 3, o:1, dev:sdd3
[ 9815.410000] md0: detected capacity change from 0 to 3997584588800
[ 9816.550000] md0: unknown partition table
[ 9832.850000] EXT4-fs (md0): ext4_check_descriptors: Checksum for group 0 failed (36899!=2085)
[ 9832.850000] EXT4-fs (md0): group descriptors corrupted!
[10464.430000] EXT2-fs (md0): error: couldn't mount because of unsupported optional features (240)
[10663.840000] EXT3-fs (md0): error: couldn't mount because of unsupported optional features (240)
[12024.130000] EXT4-fs (md0): ext4_check_descriptors: Checksum for group 0 failed (36899!=2085)
[12024.130000] EXT4-fs (md0): group descriptors corrupted!

[/] # mdadm --detail /dev/md0
/dev/md0:
Version : 00.90.03
Creation Time : Sat Apr 28 17:34:58 2012
Raid Level : raid6
Array Size : 3903891200 (3723.04 GiB 3997.58 GB)
Used Dev Size : 1951945600 (1861.52 GiB 1998.79 GB)
Raid Devices : 4
Total Devices : 4
Preferred Minor : 0
Persistence : Superblock is persistent

Update Time : Sat Apr 28 17:38:02 2012
State : clean
Active Devices : 4
Working Devices : 4
Failed Devices : 0
Spare Devices : 0

Chunk Size : 64K

UUID : 4d647908:4630a588:174068ed:1431188e
Events : 0.3

Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 8 3 0 active sync /dev/sda3
1 8 19 1 active sync /dev/sdb3
2 8 35 2 active sync /dev/sdc3
3 8 51 3 active sync /dev/sdd3


Seems ok to me. Arrgh!

Any clues as to why it won't mount? Lots of threads on google, no solutions however. I think my data is gone this time.
desmodus
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by desmodus »

Then I tried what I suspected would work with mounted drives anyway - I downloaded the latest firmware (3.6.1 Build0302) from qnap support site, and used the qfinder to update the firmware again. Before it was failing at the 20% mark - which I assumed was when it tried to write the firmware down and errored due to lack of mounted volumes. But this time it worked. After rebooting it, it became visible on the network, and I was able to jump to the admin website for the NAS! All original settings, etc were recovered, all 4 drives back online, and I was able to browse my data from W7 network share.
I think I am at the same point as you are at the moment. I cannot get past the 20% mark, since I ejected all my disks. The reason for this is the pop-up I am getting when I select the Firmware in QNAP Finder: Some of the system settings have not been initialized. To avoid update failure you are recommended to initialize the system first. Click "Yes" to continue to update the system. Is it correct to think that if I leave the drives in, it will format them and clear all data? My NAS is configures as a RAID5.

I am only using 3 bays at the moment... should I get a blank disk and place it the empty bay and have that mounted when installing the firmware, and then put my configuration backup back and the 3 RAID5 disks? Just an idea?
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schumaku
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Re: TS-412 won't boot after firmware update

Post by schumaku »

desmodus wrote:I think I am at the same point as you are at the moment. I cannot get past the 20% mark, since I ejected all my disks.
The complete update QNAP Finder, Web UI, and sos on are doing can't be done without the disks installed.
desmodus wrote:The reason for this is the pop-up I am getting when I select the Firmware in QNAP Finder: Some of the system settings have not been initialized. To avoid update failure you are recommended to initialize the system first. Click "Yes" to continue to update the system. Is it correct to think that if I leave the drives in, it will format them and clear all data? My NAS is configures as a RAID5.
Should not - but this might proof there is an issue with the configuration of your NAS.
desmodus wrote:I am only using 3 bays at the moment... should I get a blank disk and place it the empty bay and have that mounted when installing the firmware, and then put my configuration backup back and the 3 RAID5 disks? Just an idea?
Nope, not at all. Part of the firmware is installed on two system partitions, too.

Does your NAS operate normally when booted with the HDD installed?

If yes - depending on the previous firmware installed - additional steps might be required. In absence of a crystal ball - here the standard process:

Please do the manual update from the Linux shell - this is most safe for your NAS - and the only one allowing to copy-pater the transcript of the update process to the forum here in case, so we can see what might have failed.

Login on the NAS by SSH from your computer (Windows: PuTTY http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ or OS X Terminal app: $ ssh admin@[NAS-IP-address]) using the admin credentials. Then you can enter the commands (the [~] shows just the current directory, the # is the prompt.

The update process shown here http://wiki.qnap.com/wiki/Manually_Updating_Firmware - just the 1-2-3 should be enough.

This is the only verbose update, permitting the community members to help in case something goes mad.

Regards,
-Kurt.
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