5Big Network 2 - will not appear on network - Faulty NIC?

[headdown]

Hi all,

Bit desperate for help here as Lacie have been useless with their Tech Support and the unit is now out of warranty, so any advice gratefully received, please.

My 5Big Network 2 suddenly disappeared from the network one day. I came home, it wasn't showing up. Didn't know why. Rebooted, attempted a reset etc, no joy.

I suspect that there was a short lived power cut to the house, as this has since happened a few times while I have been at home. Power had been restored automatically from somewhere outside the house after a few minutes.

Anyway, I gave up with the Lacie and just left it for months, unplugged.

One day, out of curiosity I plugged it in, powered it up and connected it to my router. Hey presto, it worked!

Guess what, the same thing has happened. I didn't have time to pull all the data off, it was up for such a short time.

Now, the unit is again not appearing on the network.

The router does not detect the connection of a wired device when using either LAN port on the Lacie. The green LAN port lights illuminate and sometimes flicker, but I understand that's all coming from the router.

Have tried both LAN ports. No joy on either.

Lacie support told me to open Terminal, "arp -a" and look for the unit's MAC address, but it's not there. The router's management interface shows no device.

Therefore, I and Lacie suspect the NIC is screwed.

Power brick shows solid blue light.

Power up behaviour:

Front light flashes blue.

Rear disk lights alternate red/blue. As each disk initiates from left to right, each drive light flashes blue. All flash on same timing. Front light stabilises solid blue.

Can do accurate timings if required.

It basically looks like it is working, until you try to connect to the router, when it simply never appears on the network.


So, does anyone have any solutions at all regarding how I could fix it?

The unit's out of warranty, so I can't return it but am happy to get DIY on it.

My options, as I see them at the moment:

1) Find another working 5BigN2 and put the disks into that, hope it accepts the whole array as is without corrupting it, and then pull all the data off then buy a better product
2) Open my 5BigN2, identify the NIC and try to source a working replacement

Are either of the above viable?

The Lacie support guy said "technically, the array is managed by the disk, so swapping the drives into another unit should, technically, work, as long as they are put in in the same order as in the faulty unit.".

He would not tell me anything about DIY replacement of the NIC. Googling doesn't get me anything on it, although I could be phrasing it wrong.

It's a hard lesson to learn, as this is my first foray into NAS. "Spend more, buy better, budget a UPS" is my motto going forwards.

Any input or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your support.

[fvdw]

As said on nas central I suggest download the fvdw-sl console and try to load the kirkwood standalone kernel (how see help of fvdw-sl console). That kernel runs from RAM. If that works you know that the ethernet interface is ok and it must be a firmware problem, additional you can start investigation the disks using the standalone kernel.

[ETRAIN]

Hi there desperate here with LaCie 5big network 2, I have the exact problem like you described, did you fix it? if so can you let me know what was the issue? Thank you.

[Jocko]

Hi

You need first to do what fvdw said. So first step is to try to get a telnet access with our fvdw-sl console