Post by psyang on Jun 1, 2016 5:05:54 GMT 7
Hi everyone,
Just created an account to post my ordeal the last few days, and hope that it will help someone else.
Last week my 7700ProV2 became unresponsive. Rebooting it would cause it to hang with the Self Testing... message on the front.
I logged the issue with Thecus, and because I could hear the BIOS beep, they sent me instructions to update to the latest firmware from a usb stick. This did not work since the NAS was hung and would not get to the point where it would read the usb stick to update.
I decided I needed to try to recover the data first, then figure out how to repair the NAS. As I started piecing together a machine to spin up my drives from spare parts around the house, I discovered that some had successfully soldered a vga out adapter to the motherboard to get video. More searching brought me to this page which allowed me to get video out without soldering or finding parts I didn't already have. I plugged in a usb keyboard and I was all set.
Once I booted again, I discovered the boot sequence was hanging during the modprobe e1000e command. I'm not a linux guy, but from what I can tell, this is where the ethernet ports are queried and drivers loaded.
I then rebooted the nas, and went into the bios screen. There was no option to disable onboard networking, but being desperate, I disabled all of the pci-express ports hoping the ethernet ports used pci-e. They did. The boot sequence completed, and I was able to log into root using the admin password I had set up. I noticed that the drives were unavailable as they use one or more of the pci-e ports as well.
I then edited /etc/cfg/rc and commented out the lines that called modprobe e1000e. I rebooted, re-enabled all of the pci-e ports, and the nas came up fine, albeit with no networking. I was now able to plug in an external drive and recover my data onto it.
In terms of fixing the nas, I'm looking to see how much a replacement motherboard will cost. In the meantime, I did get it up and running with some luck.
It turned out that it was the second ethernet port (lan port) that failed and caused the hang - the primary wan/lan port was still functional. I hoped that the two ethernet ports were on their own pci-e port, and that if I just disabled the pci-e port used by the lan device, I would have a fully functional nas. Essentially, that's what I did. By disabling the second pci-e port, and changing /etc/cfg/rc back to its original setting, I was able to boot the nas with my raid array intact and with the nas on the network. Seeing the nas web page again was a huge relief.
You would think that, if the primary lan/wan port failed too, I could plug in a pci-e network card into the pci-e slot, and still be operational. But this isn't the case. the primary lan/wan port is on the first pci-e port, and if you disable that port in the bios, all of the pci-e ports are disabled, and you cannot change them. So, my nas will continue to run until the lan/wan port dies on me - hopefully not for a long time. I also started backing up my nas data to a secondary external hard drive - lesson learned!
Anyways, I hope this helps someone else. The Self Testing... message seems pretty common, and the video out hack went a long way into solving this issue. I was certain my nas was an expensive paperweight before that.
Just created an account to post my ordeal the last few days, and hope that it will help someone else.
Last week my 7700ProV2 became unresponsive. Rebooting it would cause it to hang with the Self Testing... message on the front.
I logged the issue with Thecus, and because I could hear the BIOS beep, they sent me instructions to update to the latest firmware from a usb stick. This did not work since the NAS was hung and would not get to the point where it would read the usb stick to update.
I decided I needed to try to recover the data first, then figure out how to repair the NAS. As I started piecing together a machine to spin up my drives from spare parts around the house, I discovered that some had successfully soldered a vga out adapter to the motherboard to get video. More searching brought me to this page which allowed me to get video out without soldering or finding parts I didn't already have. I plugged in a usb keyboard and I was all set.
Once I booted again, I discovered the boot sequence was hanging during the modprobe e1000e command. I'm not a linux guy, but from what I can tell, this is where the ethernet ports are queried and drivers loaded.
I then rebooted the nas, and went into the bios screen. There was no option to disable onboard networking, but being desperate, I disabled all of the pci-express ports hoping the ethernet ports used pci-e. They did. The boot sequence completed, and I was able to log into root using the admin password I had set up. I noticed that the drives were unavailable as they use one or more of the pci-e ports as well.
I then edited /etc/cfg/rc and commented out the lines that called modprobe e1000e. I rebooted, re-enabled all of the pci-e ports, and the nas came up fine, albeit with no networking. I was now able to plug in an external drive and recover my data onto it.
In terms of fixing the nas, I'm looking to see how much a replacement motherboard will cost. In the meantime, I did get it up and running with some luck.
It turned out that it was the second ethernet port (lan port) that failed and caused the hang - the primary wan/lan port was still functional. I hoped that the two ethernet ports were on their own pci-e port, and that if I just disabled the pci-e port used by the lan device, I would have a fully functional nas. Essentially, that's what I did. By disabling the second pci-e port, and changing /etc/cfg/rc back to its original setting, I was able to boot the nas with my raid array intact and with the nas on the network. Seeing the nas web page again was a huge relief.
You would think that, if the primary lan/wan port failed too, I could plug in a pci-e network card into the pci-e slot, and still be operational. But this isn't the case. the primary lan/wan port is on the first pci-e port, and if you disable that port in the bios, all of the pci-e ports are disabled, and you cannot change them. So, my nas will continue to run until the lan/wan port dies on me - hopefully not for a long time. I also started backing up my nas data to a secondary external hard drive - lesson learned!
Anyways, I hope this helps someone else. The Self Testing... message seems pretty common, and the video out hack went a long way into solving this issue. I was certain my nas was an expensive paperweight before that.