Buffalo TeraStation - TFTP Mode Lost Boot Image

[Joanne]

Has anyone ever recovered one of these units from this error? Precisely it's a TS-XE4.0L/R5. I've scoured the Buffalo forums to NO AVAIL. This is a working from home effort, so will appreciate ideas to try during the day and I'll have a dez at night.

 

Here is what I have tried -

 

putting all factory original hard drives back in the unit (3 have previously failed)

trying 4 working hard drives

cloning drives from a known working unit

attaching a machine with IP address 192.168.11.1 running TFTP to a folder with the units firmware

running NAS Navi and trying to find the station on the network

 

I can't ping the thing, even when on the same IP range.

 

SO - if you can help me get it working again that would be lovely. It is a backup drive for my self employed primary and they can't really afford a new one. I've got a 1TB HDD attached to the server for backups at the moment, and as you can appreciate - that isn't ideal

[newpersn]

reinstalling the firmware when its in recovery mode?

[Joanne]

Ah yes... the fabled recovery mode. It won't boot into EM mode. No matter how long I hold the little red button for!

[newpersn]

Guessing you seen this page

 

http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Terastation_Recovery

 

I'm sure I used this page when I had fault with our LS220

[Joanne]

Guessing you seen this page

 

http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Terastation_Recovery

 

I'm sure I used this page when I had fault with our LS220

I have not! I'm thinking the software on the hard drives is gone... will try this tonight. What an exciting life I lead! 😂

[newpersn]

any update @Joanne

[Joanne]

I have a case open with buffalo, so I've been following their documentation. This involved downloading 3 files and extracting them. Connecting the laptop to the terastation LAN, changing the IP to 192.168.11.1 on the laptop, running a firmware updating exe which pushed files to the terastation. I think I did this 8 times until I made some progress. Now the terastation shows up in NAS Navigator in EM mode. Now I'm trying to write the software to it, but it continues to fail. I am going to be trying again this evening. I think you just have to be patient and eventually it will take the files!!

[Joanne]

Right... I've got the unit up and running, but I had a luxury many may not have - another terastation of the same model. I was given 3 hard drives with it, so I stuck them in and put one of the hard drives from my broken unit. This one booted and I managed to get onto the web interface. Many hard drive issues / errors / failures later, I managed to format 4 drives in it. I shut it down and then moved these drives over to my broken unit - ET VOILA! No longer broken. Which proves (not that there was any doubt) that the web interface/software is stored on the hard drives themselves, and if you loose more than 2 hard drives.... creek and paddle come to mind.

 

This terastation now has all the settings the other one had. Not ideal. I set it to factory restore and format last night, but when I returned to it this morning it hadn't finished, some 8 hours later. Leaving it some more and seeing what happens.

[newpersn]

They work in strange ways. I got a LS-WXL33C that wants Re-syncing Raid Array 1 every month.....

[spdaimon]

I fixed mine, and posted my findings on Reddit. You can see what I did here:

. Hope this helps someone else. It was fustrating! Buffalo needs to have a FAQ or something. Or maybe some software package that does all I had to do. Over 6 hours of research and trial and error. Edited October 7, 2017 by spdaimon