Starting over with a brand new disk: an experience

[mdi]

Hi guys,
I'd like to tell you my experience of last night (nothing hard, but rather "hardware" instead). :-D

Last week my NAS, running fvdw v15 died. The disk is gone, after something like 3 years of activity.
So I ordered a new HDD on Amazon.
Yesterday it arrived, and instead of a 1TB disk, I ordered a 2TB Toshiba one.

In the past I have installed firmware v10 manually, then v11 still manually, and I saved the instruction files.
This time I wanted to give the new fvdw Console a try.
Maybe I misunderstood its usage, or maybe I just should make clearer to myself what's needed to prepare a brand new empty disk with the console (and maybe knowing what uBoot is).

Anyway, I put my new disk in my open Network Space 2 and I turned it on.
Flashing blu/red light.
The Console could not find it on the network.
I read the instructions more than once, and it seems that the NAS is supposed to capable of answering on the network and allow you to start over with a new empty disk.

It was not my case.
So, I connected the disk to a Linux machine and started partitioning.

I was surprised when I tried to create the first partition, as the first "block" was 2048 instead of 1.
I started surfing in the forum looking for similar issues, as I thought that my HDD wasn't really ok for the NAS.
Finally I compared my screen with the example one on the fvdw guide and I noticed that within the fdisk program you have to press 'u' to switch to the "deprecated" unit of measure, which correspond to the one of the firmware installation guide (cylinders).

With that, the new primary partition started from '1'. So I could go ahead with the installation.
No problem installing firmware version 11 directly onto the newly partitioned disk.
When the operation on partition 8 was going on, I started in parallel to complete the tasks on the other partitions, just to save time.

Finally I moved the disk again to the NAS and turned it on.
A perfect new working NAS! :applause

BUT!
Before the disk-crash, I was used to backup the content of my NAS to another disk which is my router's USB-attached external HDD. This disk is 2TB and I copied the "public" share weekly to it.
More, I was able to also copy the firmare's database (actually the nas_conf_db_ok.xml file) to it.

So, I needed to restore the original NAS configuration without redoing everything at hand!
Copying this file over the right position, so that I could use the specific NAS web interface's option to restore the configuration database, allowed me to restore the nas name, the shares, the DynDNS settings and all other settings.
I noticed that MiniDLNA could not be installed again: solved by deleting the (empty) share that reloading the database created, and selecting the option to re-install the MiniDLNA server.

So far, so good.
The only thing I regred a bit, though it's not a big problem, is that my cron tasks are all gone. So my scheduled backups are lost and I have to recreate those commands again.
They were rsync commands, which were also a bit tricky (see a previous post of mine).

So, apart from the fact that I've lost some time with the new console and that I have to recreate the backup jobs, everything is again up and running.

My suggestions:
- always backup your NAS content! You can do automatically overnight, with the cron scheduler (available as part of fvdw firmware).
- also copy the configuration database (nas_conf_db_ok.xml).

Guys, maybe it could help getting the instructions and the needed files all on a same post, so that people approaching the fvdw firmware or having to start over from scratch like I had to do, could find a step by step guide along with all the necessary files on the same "page" or "post", instead of having to scan the forum looking for the required posts.
What about having a sort of wiki page so that we can integrate with the info we find useful (like "Press U to switch to the correct unit of measure in fdisk...", or similar things), which acts as the 1st time installation guide?
I think that could help and we can sure start from the good post related to this topic!

This was just my experience and I'm proud of powering my beloved NAS with fvdw firmware!!

Thank you guys for the marvellous job!

[fvdw]

:thumbup thanks for sharing your experience mdi it is much appreciated as it helps us to improve firmware and installation further


About your remark on having a backup of the cron jobs. The cron jobs are stored in a separate share (name "cronjobs") including the log file. If you would have made a backup of that share then they all would all have been there.

About installation
To make install easier the fvdw-sl console was introduced, it runs under windows.
It has been used already by many but using it is still not straight forward. Apparently the instructions in the short text window and the help menu (detailed info for each action) are still not clear enough.

You described this

Code: Select all

Anyway, I put my new disk in my open Network Space 2 and I turned it on.
Flashing blu/red light.
The Console could not find it on the network.
I read the instructions more than once, and it seems that the NAS is supposed to capable of answering on the network and allow you to start over with a new empty disk.

Reading this I think you did not read the the instructions properly (see short text in the console and the separate help menu) for the action installing fvdw-sl firmware.
You first need to switch off your nas, Start the console, choose the action you want to perform and start the nas when the fvdw-sl console tells you to do so. Not earlier. if you switch it on to early then the console is not ready to detect the booting and interrupt it.

The blue flashing led when putting in the hdd is normal as the disk was not paritioned. then u-boot can not continue with booting and keeps flashing blue.

but thks again for your feedback we will use it for sure.

[mdi]

Thank you very much fvdw, that's was probably the bit i was missing, as I did switch off the nas and try all the possible ways except selecting the action on the console BEFORE the nas was recognized.

I was so impatient to restore my nas that I didn't try to first ask you in the forum. I was curious to give the console s try under Windows, it will be next time:-)

Thanks for the info about the cron, sure now i will backup it!

And thank you for the support, it's so kind you answer all the requests!