I have a 16 bay Qnap server that has suddenly decided to stop working. I have tried taking out all of the 16 drives, but it still wont boot. When power is plugged into either of the PSU’s (or both), then a red light and an orange light appear on the motherboard, but pressing the power button does nothing, as if the signal never even reaches the board. There is no fan speed up, no beeping or flashing lights on the board, and there is no LED appearing on the power button.
I contacted QNAP and they said that they could repair it for roughtly 1500 USD because it is out of warranty and I would have to ship it to the netherlands and back. There is no guarantee that they will get the data back, just that they would get the server working.
It is more important to me to get the data back than to actually have a working QNAP system. It’s just a shame that there wasn’t a backup of this system.
I believe that one should be able to get the data off if I moved the drives to another QNAP system, but I cannot find any cheap 16+ bay servers on ebay (UK), nor can I find any organization that will lease me a compatible server for a short period of time or a company that can repair such systems here in the UK. Any links to a company that could provide such a service would be greatly appreciated.
Do you have any suggestions? I don’t know what RAID level the system.
What model is yours? The one I was dealing with was also 16 bay.
Hypothetically, you should be able to get at the data in Linux. I did not have luck with that, but in my case I think something was wrong somewhere in the md/lvm/ext4 stack.
In your case, it seems like your mobo has died, so the data should be fine.
If you were to rent a unit to get the data off, where would you put it (the data)? If you have ample space on another server or in the cloud or whatever, you can go through the painstaking process of dding all of the drives to image files on your other storage. From there you should be able to assemble it and access the data.
After a quick look on ebay.co.uk, you can get something relatively cheap (certainly less than $1500), that will at least get you at the data:
How comfortable are you wrestling with mdadm/lvm2 in Linux?
Edit: looks like you’d need to get drive caddies for that unit as well. That’s kind of annoying since it’s pictured with them…
semi-confident with mdadm/lvm raid. I’ve set up RAID arrays with them in the past, but I have never had to rescue a RAID from a dead server before. It looks like I should be able to boot up with the drives plugged in, and linux will auto detect it?
I keep seeing online posts where people have tried to rescue qnap using linux, but never seen a post where it was successful. However its worth a shot as we have a spare linux box that can take that number of drives.
Would be grateful if you could confirm the steps I should run. I’m pretty sure if I’m not very careful I could end up screwing the RAID/drives.
Yeah, the one I was working on is a TS-EC1680-RP, so pretty close.
Yep, but before you do that, you should make sure you have all the same kernel modules loaded. On a live usb at least, you don’t necessarily have all of md-related ones, even after installing mdadm.
Here are all the kernel modules that are loaded on the TS-EC1680U. Not all of them will load for you in Ubuntu or whatever, but most will. The others may be something QNAP developed for whatever purpose. Those shouldn’t be relevant to the md raid (hopefully).