QNAP 412 Turbo Nas – no more disk space

QNAP 412 Turbo Nas – no more disk space

I have a QNAP 412 Turbo Nas and ran out of disk space. No problem you say?
Well.. apparently QNAP’s are very fragily when it comes to 100% disk space usage.

Symptoms could be:

• • console: ls freezes, rm’s freeze
• • winscp/ftp/web admin: cannot delete files (times out)
• • reboot: NAS becomes unavailable, doesn’t show up in your network anymore, QFinder can’t find your nas
• • even my Windows 7 box became unstable because I mapped a few network drives to my shares

I’ve tried upgrading my firmware (remove your disks first! use 1 old hdd) but this doesn’t help. As soon as you insert your old drives, it returns to slowmotion mode.. (aka. timeouts).

I then contacted QNAP via their support forum and here’s their solution:

1. Turn off your QNAP NAS
2. Pull out all HDD’s
3. Restart QNAP without the HDD’s
4. Use QFinder to detect the IP
5. Put back the HDD’s
6. Don’t follow the installation wizard (web)! Instead, connect via SSH (use putty?), login credentials will probably be admin/admin
7. Execute these commands (mount the raid):

mdadm -A /dev/md9 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1
mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3 /dev/sdc3 /dev/sdd3
cd /mnt
(Under /mnt)
mkdir HDA_ROOT
cd /share
(Under /share)
mkdir MD0_DATA
 
mount /dev/md9 /mnt/HDA_ROOT
mount /dev/md0 /share/MD0_DATA -t ext4
(or mount /dev/md0 /share/MD_DATA -t ext3)

8. Your shares should now be accesible again in /share/MD0_DATA so you can delete some data. QNAP recommends atleast 3GB free space.
9. Reboot your NAS with this command: ‘reboot’
10. Your NAS should now be accesible again.

So all in all this fixes the problem and I still have all my data. But I do think QNAP should have added an extra fail-safe to prevent this from happening. We’re not all technical people and most people won’t even know what SSH is..