Having a NASmare!

I haven't posted for a while. This is because my life has been stolen by a NAS drive caddy.

I got the caddy last Friday, a week ago today. It was unpacked and fitted with the 320Gb SATA drive in about 10 minutes. Plugged in and powered up 5 minutes later.

Problem #1

I logged into the NAS via my Chrome browser. The NAS came with a nifty piece of software that found out the IP address of the NAS on my network. Looking through the setup screens I noticed that the fitted drive wasn't recognised by the NAS. I thought this might be the case as the NAS stated it would only work with FAT32 and not NTFS drives. Luckily there was a format utility within the NAS so this should be easily fixed. But no, some sort of error was reported.

I tried the NAS drive by USB. Success! Windows 7 recognised the drive and mounted it without a problem, I could read and write files so I new the drive was OK. So time to format it to FAT32. The only option other than NTFS was exFAT, that should be OK, or so I thought. I took advice from a mate of mine (the one who gave me the drive) and he advised flashing the NAS drive's firmware with an Icybox version of the same NAS which was 'much better'.

Problem #2

Keen to get going I followed the supplied link by my mate to the Raidsonic site to download the Icybox IB 903-N firmware. I flashed the firmware on my Pluscom NAS. This basically overwrites the installed program with the new version. I wasn't too worried flash updates usually go fine although there is a risk of 'bricking' your device. If it doesn't work all your left with is a brick! The flash went fine, it updated and rebooted, so I tried the login again as usual using admin as the user and my password that I had set earlier. The password didn't work, again I wasn't worried, obviously it has reset to default because of the update. The default was 'admin' also but no, that didn't work either...........gulp! Bricked!

Now, going back to problem #1, I realised after a bit of research, exFAT is Microsoft's updated version of FAT32 and is not the same! Ha, so I downloaded another utility called 'Penknife' to format the drive to FAT32. That will sort it! No, it didn't. Sadly I realised all along that initial problem was the lack of a FAT32 format and the update wasn't necessary.

I emailed the seller on ebay for help. I needed to know how to hard reset the NAS as unusually, there is no reset button fitted. They responded, but not with anything I didn't already know. I emailed Raidsonic who wrote the new firmware, they advised the NAS is faulty!

Over the past week I have spent many hours trying to sort this out, trying to log in and to hard reset the NAS so it loads the default password. Nothing works. I'm now trying to return the drive as faulty but the ebay seller has gone strangely quiet........I may have to sell the NAS on ebay as an external drive only without the NAS bit working. Luckily as I got the 320Gb drive for free, I might get most of my £40 back at least.

What a NASmare.