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De-bricking the Iomega IX4-200d

I recently had a couple of comments on some of my IX4-200d posts asking for some assistance with the IX4, this chap (Johan) had experienced a failure of some sort that left his IX4 dead as a dodo (you all know the signs, a red LED of death and a graphic on the front of the unit that brings a lump to your throat.

In the case of Johan he had either tried upgrading all the drives on his unit at once (formatting them in the process) or had a catastrophic hardware failure that ensured the disks were wiped clean (Johan, please post a comment here for clarification purposes). Anyway, his request was to see if it would be possible to take a copy of my NAS OS partition and sending it over to him. Now I have to admit that I was a bit loath to take out the disks from either of my two 8TB units as I really didn’t want to risk losing the data but as luck would have it I still had the original 500gb drives from when I upgraded my IX4 earlier on in the year so I told Johan that I would see what I could do.

I got home tonight and powered off one of my machines, removed all the disks and replaced it with one of the drives from the IX4, I then booted up the pc with my trusty Acronis TrueImage 11 USB key and as luck would have it Acronis could read the Linux ext2 partition. Taking a sector copy of the partition for testing purposes I then wrote back my saved TIB file back to the original disk thereby overwriting the original partition with the new one, that gave me to all intents and purposes a vanilla drive.

I then powered off my IX4 and removed all 4 drives (taking note to keep them in order for when I placed them back in the unit). I then took the re-imaged 500gb drive and placed it back into the IX4 and powered it up.

Apart from the fact that it was complaining about the remaining drives missing the unit powered up and I was able to launch the web console to view the system information. At this stage the unit wanted to overwrite the existing drive with new partition information (this was for the data partition rather than the NAS OS partition which wasn’t present when the drive was partitioned). A few minutes later I had a single working drive back in the unit.

What this means is that all is not potentially lost if you have a unit failure, by my reckoning you should be able to de-brick the device if you can boot up the drive with a single working NAS OS partition and for that to take control to re-write the remaining NAS OS partitions to the rest of the disks, what I obviously can’t guarantee is that your data partitions will be in a working condition and that you won’t have lost any data.

With that in mind I have made a copy of the active NAS OS partition and made it available ****** Please refer to this post for the correct links for the pre-cloud edition TIB files. ****** on a file sharing website (FileSonic) you can grab the image file from here, the file is in the Acronis TIB format and only weighs in at 145MB. You will need to use Acronis TrueImage 11 (or possibly 12 which was just released this week) to restore the image, TrueImage can be purchased from the Acronis website.

 

 

Simon

30 Comments

  1. I just tried your image, but i am not having any success booting up on the IX4. Unfortunately i dont have any of the original 500GB disks anymore, so i had to try with a WD20EARS disk. I get the 2GB partition alright, but the IX4 does not boot up. I have tried using fdisk on it to make sure that the volume was active and set as “boot”.
    When i write the image using True Image, it sets the offset to 1MB, where on the original image/disk it is set to 31kb – which i cannot choose in True Image.
    Any input appreciated. If you by any chance have a DD/TIB file of an WD20EARS disk i would really like to try that one out.

    • Out of interest have you tried running the EARS disks with the jumper fitted? I ask because with the jumper off I had poorer performance than with it on (having the jumper on changes the drive formatting to ignore the new advanced format) and could be why the image isn’t working for you.

      As it stands I may well be getting a drive from an IX4 Cloud edition tomorrow (work colleague bought the unit and hasn’t used it yet, I asked to borrow the drive to take an image). If I can I will try and redo both images but no guarantees.

  2. I have tried woth jumper there – same result.
    I did actually get it to boot once. Showed up as NAS2. But when i asked it to “reclaim” the storage left on the one disk, it rebooted and crashed again.
    i used fdisk from a live CD to delete all current partitions on the disk, so the disk should be clean. tried with and without “restore signature” option in true image.

    Thanks – would be great to try an image form an 2TB IX4. Do you know if the cloud edition will run on the original IX4 hardware?

    • Perfect – thank you very much, it is back alive!!

      Do you by any chance know where to get hold of a “Cloud Edition” ix4 image? I would like to see if you can upgrade the “non-cloud” device.

      again – thanks!!

  3. Hi!!!

    I can’t download the image since all sharing functionality on FileSonic is now disabled.

    Please, could you share it on another site?

    Thank you very much!!!

      • That will be great!! This is the last hope to recover my ix4-200d device!!

        Thank you very much!!

        • Tanuder,

          Apologies for the delay but if you look at the main page I now have two images available for download.

          Regards,

          Simon

  4. I was in the process of removing all of my Shared folders on my ix4-200d and for good measure I also clicked on the command to Erase the drives. The unit then sent itself into a Restart and now it is stuck. The LCD screen shows “StorCenter ix4” with the progress meter showing 75%. I left the unit in this state for a day and a half. I tried removing all but the first drive and rebooted but with the same results. I tried booting from the USB key I made for upgrading to the latest firmware. I even tried booting with nothing in the drives and I do get a different response but this time it showed the typical USB symbol and other picture when there is no OS loading. I put the 4 drives back in and rebooted with it still stuck on 75%. Where should I begin to fix this?

    • Hi Michael,

      I have never experienced anything like this before but what I can suggest is perhaps putting the drives back in to the IX4 in a different order, the data partition will obviously be completely destroyed (which is what you want anyway) but as the OS partition isn’t actually raided across the drives you should still be able to power on the device successfully.

      I can tell you that in the past I have experienced the unit being unresponsive for up to 48 hours whilst it’s doing operations (one of the reasons why I now suggest removing the data partition before carrying out any other work).

      Good luck.

      • I moved the drives around but the same issue with the unit being stuck at 75%. I am hoping that if I just leave it for a couple of days, it may get past this issue and bring itself back online. Wishful thinking is what comes to mind but not sure what else to do unless I was to try wiping the drives (all but 1) clean and swap in a spare and work from scratch. Just hoping that nothing happens to my Mac while I have no TimeMachine backups running.

        • It is working once again. Not sure what was keeping the unit stuck at that 75% so I removed all of the partitions on all drives and used your image on a USB thumb drive and presto. Thank you again.

  5. Did you by chance ever get a hold of the Cloud edition image and would it upgrade the standard ix4-200d?

    • Funny you should ask because today I have created a USB recovery disk with the latest Cloud FW on it and I will be testing over the weekend, no definites but I will post more about it over the weekend.

      As far as the original image is concerned Marcelo I am afraid I don’t have that to hand any more, I am hoping that the original disks that I have still have the image on it, I am in the process of backing up the data onto another device at which time I will power one down and swap out drives to test.

    • Hi not at the moment, I can tell you that having dug a little deeper it appears that there were some instructions around on the net on how to do this buy Iomega asked the person who had them posted to remove them because in 75% of cases the upgrade failed and it bricked the NAS to the point that it really was a brick, no matter what was attempted it wasn’t possible to return the device back to life.

  6. Now that I’ve gone through this entire thread, I’m not yet convinced that the benefits of Cloud Edition are worth the hassel of writing a completely new partion to the device.
    I’m not a Linux junkie but I am very familiar with Acronis BU/Restore 9.5, 10, and 11 for Windows.
    .
    I think I understand the risks of trying to convert an older device with 2.1.40.8151 firmware to 3.2.3.15290 but….
    .
    Can somebody please explain the benefits of Cloud Edition that make this worth the time and risk of bricking?

  7. Hi Simon,

    I’d really appreciate it if you can share the image file again since filesonic isn’t letting me download it anymore. Also, if you want, I can host that file for you as well. please contact me. Thanks!

  8. Do you have a copy of the cloud edition partition; because i bought a cloud edition on internet without disks in it but i cannot restore the original cloud edition firmware with the usb flash drive trick (i already lost 2 wd20ears drives with stuck heads to the platters because of upgrading it with the cloud edition firmware through the usb flash trick. Your firmware however does work; but the system partition seems to be too small to support my 2tb disks (four of them). I got erros when i filled the nas completely and contacting iomega resulted in creating a dump file that completely destroyed my data because the firmware partition was full.

    • Ruben, apologies but no I don’t, because I don’t have the Cloud edition there was no way to take a copy of the partition.

      One thing for you, because the drives have two partitions I only ever needed to take a copy of the first partition to copy the OS on to the drives, once that was there (doing it a single drive at a time) and ensuring that no actual storage space was enabled I could always create full drives once all 4 drives were inserted into the NAS and updated with the OS striped against all 4 drives.
      Once striped across all 4 drives I would then create the data partition (it didn’t matter if I created a raid 0, 1 or 5 because it would ensure that the data partitions were all deleted before started to build up the new one).

      The rebuild took a few days but it would use the rest of the drive space.

      One bit of advice may be that the drives you have installed aren’t actually supported (if you’re replacing your old drives with larger capacity), it was certainly something I experienced previously.

      Good luck tho, if worse comes to the worse then RMA the unit if you can.

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