My Synology DSM Blue LED issue was actually just a failed drive!

This weekend I spent several hours trying to resolve an issue with my Synology DS413j which I use for backing up my other two Synology hosts (DS412+).

I was experiencing many of the symptoms in the following post, yet I was convinced I could not have been hacked, as this server is not available to the internet! Not only that but I recently updated DSM (2-3 weeks ago) so wondered if this could be the cause?…

http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=82141

After following the full 11 step fix (minus the migratable step as it wouldn’t work), I still had a box which was unresponsive. My symptoms were:

  • Power LED light blinks blue
  • I could not log into the DSM console
  • DSM login simply says “Processing, please wait” forever or eventually times out
  • I was able to ping DSM
  • I could not reset DSM using the reset button on the back of the device
  • Booting of the device took a very long time (up to 20 mins) and Synology Assistant shows “Starting Services…” for a very long time
  • Even after following rebuild steps I could not get the Synology Assistant to show “Migratable”
  • Once booted I could see the SMB shares and access them intermittently

After much head scratching I decided to take each of the drives in turn and test them on my Windows desktop. I have 4 drives in the host, 2x Seagate and 2x WD Red. If any of them were going to fail I believed the Seagate would be at fault, so I tested those first. I plugged in disk number one, ran some tests, all ok. I then plugged in disk number two, and discovered that windows would not even mount the drive. Not only that but it was actually causing device manager to hang.

Faulty drive identified, I powered on the Synology with the remaining 3 drives only. Much to my relief, the system booted within a minute and started to beep, warning me I was missing a drive. DSM is now responding just fine.

I have now ordered a new WD Red drive to replace the failed Seagate (which was out of its very short warranty of course!).

Moral of the story: If your box looks like it may have been hit by SynoLocker but it was never on the internet, try testing all the drives in turn. You may just save yourself a few hours / days of pain!

One other wee tip is to also enable SSH access. I’m not sure if I could have logged in via SSH in the hung state, but it may have given me another troubleshooting avenue.

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