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N5200B Pro: PSU dead! - board damaged? - recover data? and more...
Hi everybody,
for the first time in the past 2,5 years I'm having real trouble with my N5200BPro.
So I've been reading and searching the web, but I came across a bunch of questions, I just couldn't find any (real) answers to.
Especially if they're covering the more hardware related topics it seemed difficult to me, finding the infos I was really looking for.
okay, the case:
I'm using a N5200BPro,
running a 2,5TB RAID-5 setup,
consisting of 5 Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 or .11 (not sure about exact model and can't tell right now, as I'm in the office atm)
I bought the NAS around 8/2007 and had it up and running more or less 24/7 (median up-time ~180 days) without encountering any major troubles.
Last week I had to power off my UPS for some other reason, so I shutdown the N5200BPro via Webinterface. With the shutdown sequence beeing completed normally, everything seemed to be ok.
Until the moment I tried to boot up the NAS again:
pushing the front power button did not do anything.
No LED, no LCD, not even the backside LEDs normally indicating LAN connectivity - just plain dead.
Main power switch on/off, several dis- and reconnecting power of the PSU, etc. all having no effect at all.
To keep this as short as possible: the UPS of the N5200BPro reached the end of its life cycle much sooner than I'd expected.
Short-circuiting the green and a black wire of the PSU's ATX connector left no doubt about that.
Since it was on last saturday evening, there was no chance of buying a suitable replacement PSU anywhere, and me literally having EVERYTHING I need to do ANYTHING on the NAS, I decided to give a regular ATX PSU a try.
Of course with the integrity of all my stored data beeing top priority, I unplugged the HDs before doing so.
Then, after I plugged a 400W Coolermaster PSU on to the N5200BPro's SATA backplane and powering it up (using a switch connecting green+black ATX Power / Thecus front power and/or reset button having no effect if pressed) the NAS came up at least "partial":
- The CPU fan was running,
- LAN1&2 front LEDs both lit green
- USB LED blue and
- power LED blue
...so much for the things that seemed to be okay.
Now for the parts beeing in a *cough* less regular state:
- the 80mm backplane fan wasn't running (but that may be normal if it's temperature dependent, I don't know)
- the DOM LED (topmost) lit in constant orange, indicating in-accessibility of the DOM according to the Thecus manual. (The DOM module itself has LED mounted directly onto the module's downside, that was lit blue at the same time)
- the "operating" LED or whatever the correct name may be, was glowing in constant red, indicating - surprise! - that the NAS is not running properly, due to (a) technical problem(s).
- looking from in front into the empty HD tray, the LEDs which are each located to the right of the SATA slots, were all lit red - at first.
After powering up the device several times in a row, most of the time 4 of 5 LEDs lit red, but a single one showing green light.
The sequence of colors - meaning which LEDs would be red light and which the single green one would be - altered each time I switched power off and on again. (at least to me, without any obvious pattern)
- But most disturbing definitly was the LC display not showing anything, besides its backlight beeing enabled plus a single full length line of "solid cursor blocks" ( 20(?) rectangles of a single char's max size)
- ... so not too surprisingly, pressing the LCD panel buttons didn't do or change anything.
so much for the description of the current state
... now my questions are:
Is it (in general) possible running the N5200BPro with a standard ATX PSU, instead of using the 1U PSU it's original equipped with? Any experience anyone?
- if this IS possible and someone knows exactly how to do it, advice would be very much appreciated
- and if not, how probable is it, that the mainboard has been permantently damaged too?
Or are those erros I described above possibly just a temporary result/symptom of having the NAS plugged on to a standard ATX PSU, instead of using the real thing.
Meaning these errors won't be occuring anymore, if a propper sparepart (=1U seventeam/origin PSU) is connected to the mobo again?
Assuming the N5200BPro mainboard has taken permanent damage:
I've read in another thread here, that all the data of my RAID can be "easily" recovered if I get to use another (new/working) N5200BPro and equip it with my current set of HDs.
I'm aware of maintaining the HD's sequence, which has to be identical to the sequence they used to be previously ordered by, when mounted in their "origin-NAS".
But if I'd like to procede this way to recover and finally save my data, doesn't the firmware version matter too?
Must it not differ to the origin NAS' firmware version? So if recovering my data with a N5200BPro which uses a newer FW version, then downgrading its firmware is a must too?
Or do i only need to upgrade the FW, if the FW in the origin NAS had a higher version, was newer (which, I admit, is not very probable)?
thx in advance, thx for reading (hopefully) and sorry about the li'l more than average length of my postAs the config is not readable/accessible to me with the NAS beeing in its current state, is there a way to "extract" the exact fw version from a previously downloaded config file ("conf.bin").
I'm not talking about a decompile or similar, but maybe the fw version is directly stored in there, as a numeric value, eg adress 0x001d - 0x001f or something like that?
Maybe some of the questions are of interest for some other N5200 owners too
