NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hiya,
Looking for a few pointers if you are able to help, please.

My Naslite pc used to boot up and link to my network pretty quickly, I was impressed with the speed. A while ago the Naslite start up beeps did not happen and no connection to network occured, after a few minuites I would switch it off.

After a few goes, over a few months, I decided it was probably the 8gb hdd that I use as the boot drive. Guessing that as it does not boot the drive must be on the way out....?

I've not long ordered a cf ide to put in place of the 8gb boot, but just tried firing the naslite pc up again and got the usual one short medium beep, one long angry buzzing bee buzz for about 5 seconds then a short medium beep again. Forgot, I left it on, and went to start dinner, about 6 to 8 mins later heard the familar Naslite start up beeps, ran in, and the Naslite-2 Status shortcut had appeared on my network!!

But the 500gb storage hdd in the Naslite pc does not show up....

Any thoughts as to what may be going on?

I appreciate any comments,
Cheers

could be many things - the very bad news [i guess] is it could be your 500gig drive

my route would be -

1 - pull the cable on the 500gig drive and see if it still takes 5 or 6mins to boot - that will tell you things - if it does then [imo] thats good as the fault is probably not with the 500gig drive - if it boots in a minute or so thats a worry

2 - you dont say if you have a cd rom on the system - if not put one on and boot a linux distro from that - ubuntu or mint [for example] that will let you look at the 500gig drive - if its there then great if not - well i dont know how big a disaster that is

from there - depending on the info from that there are a few ways to go

Thank you for your reply

Ah.. we boot up in about a minute (with the 500gig unplugged)

I've my main winXP desktop awaiting a cpu fan, this has the 500gig hdd in that I back up to the nas 500gig.

I'm unsure as to why, but my pc monitor (little flat screen) gets no signal when I plug my nas into it.. I'm guessing I will need a screen to see what 'Mint' thinks, I'd have to take the cdrom out the main desktop to run mint on the nas - Just thinking : Would it be reasonabley safe to swap the 500gigs, so the master goes in the nas machine and the mirror goes in, the soon to be working, main deasktop, just to see what happens?

Bit worried incase the nas somehow eats the master
(As I'm starting to think the mirror is no more)

Thanks again for your time!

different file systems on the hdd in the xp box to the naslite box - not sure xp has an add on to look at the naslite drive - but the fact that the nas box is ok [or seems to be] without the 500gig drive must initially point to the drive or something to do with it

1 - check bios - make sure that is not somehow screwed - i dont think it will be that as once the box has booted naslite should see the drive as its not bios dependant

2 - check the ide ribbon cable - difficult to think it will be that but if you have another change it

3 - check the power cable to the drive - thats my favourite if the drive is ok - the female pins in the molex plug can degrade over time and you can lose power - if theres a spare one in the box use that - if not try and tighten the connectors in the molex

after that if non of those work then the drive is looking sick - go to mint and try that

at the moment i would not be swapping drives - it proves little - certainly putting the 500gig xp one in the nas box will show you nothing apart from it may boot up - but you will not see the files

Ah ha simple things, I may have swapped them and thought I'd broken them both - but would have just been that they are different file systems - Thank you!

Once the 500 is removed the nas box boots as it always used to, as you say the naslite takes over viewing the drives, so in theory the bios should be okay... I'll have to get a screen sorted out somehow so I can see more.

Yes I tried that last night, thank you, swapped the ribon and power from 8 to 500 and visa versa, took 8 mins to boot and no 500, oh dear I thought.

I will try the spare power cable later when I get back from work, and then go towards getting a screen and mint sorted.

Many thanks for your help!!

Tried booting nas box this morning one last time and after 8mins or so it booted and in the telnet bit the 500gig showed up as not mounted, ran the repair thing on it and it reported back:
68888 inodes used (0%)
5099 non-contiguous inodes (7.4%)
of inodes with ind/dind/tind blocks : 30792/13748/1
105322657 blocks used (15%)
0 bad blocks
3 large files
63299 regular files
5580 directories
0 character device files
0 block device files
0 fifos
0 links
0 symbolic links (0 fast symbolic links)
0 sockets
68879 files

What does all this mean?

Before I ran the check and fix thing, I ran the check thing, it came back with what looked like 'too many inodes broken and ignored' sorry I should have made a note of what it said but I got the impression that the 500gig was on the way out or broken, but the fix thing seems to have fixed things.....? As I can see the files again....

Many thanks for any thoughts, or a quick explanation of what has happened...

Cheers

to what does it mean - no idea - after running the repair did you save the config and restart the box - if so did it boot quicker

if so maybe you just sorted it - depends where you want to go from here - if its working then maybe that it - or maybe the drive is on its way out

if you have everything on the XP box then risk a full format on the NAS drive and re do the backup to it - if it works fine - if not it pretty much confirms the drive is on its way out - a new one is not a fortune

Wow thanks for the quick reply, don't really want to do a format now I can read it Yeppee

But, Yes, I will do a format and mirror again to check the 500gig is working, or see if it is on the way out.

Checked the prices and SATA are so much cheaper than PATA still, to save changing over to SATA on an old machine this time I may well stick to PATA if needed

Thank you for all your help!!

It looks like the 13 year old 8gig Seagate is still going strong and I don't need the cf ide thing that arrived, shame the cf don't come in 500gig

Cheers for now

sata is possible - just get hold of a sata card - some are better than others - the promise one is good - also sold as maxtor - they come up on ebay now and again for a few pounds

others have given me trouble so i avoid them - would be a good investment as it gives you much bigger drive options

Ah cool, good tip on what make, cheers.
I'll keep my eye out, as sooner or later the 500gig if it does keep going, will need a friend to help store all the info

Well, seemed to format okay, started the mirror an hour or so ago and all seems to be running okay at the moment. Fingers crossed in the morning all will be done and working.......

Thank you very much for your help and assistance!!

Cheers

Another thing worthy of note is that you may want to pay a little more and go for a true hardware raid controller such as a 3ware/amcc/lsi card (the AMCC 3ware cards from the 9500 and later work very well and can give upto 24 drive capability) dont worry about it being a PCI-X card as they will work happily in a standard PCI Slot.

Advantage of Raid can be many but especially as you only see a large drive rather than several smaller ones but this only matters should you need a lot of storage (My array has over 9TB of data and is expanding rapidly. Keep in mind that certain types of files such as media require very large amounts of storage space. A hardware RAID controller makes expanding on the fly a little easier).

So you can soon run out of space when you start that game.

Hope this helps just a little bit

Doug

wow up to 24 discs....

9Tb....

I'm obviously under using my nas
275gb music
40gb photos

Thank you for the tip though, a mate likes to rip hd films, but can't fit them all on his pc, I'll have a little chat to him next time.

I like the idea of seeing one big disc rather than a few smaller ones.