Legacy Network Products

[RaiderRef]

Just bought this - plugged it in and had to press the switch a few times before the light at the back went green and power went to the drive.  The manual says that the front top LED will blink for upto a minute before the drive is operational.  10 hours later it is still blinking. 
I changed the router settings but Maxtor EasyManage couldn't find the drive.  Nor could I by pinging, serarching of the MAC address or Network Id.  Tried on the other PC on my network and that couldn't find it either.
I now cannot turn of the drive using the switch at the back - I need to unplug the power cable from the socket.
The power adaptor is working and that light is green and constant.  The power light on the switch at the back of the drive is on solid green.  The front bottom LED is a constant green yet the manual says that should be blinking. The online help states "Make sure the power light (at the top of the three lights), on your Shared Storage drive, is solid green. If it is not solid green, this indicates that the drive is not receiving power. Check your power cables. "
Is the problem a faulty unit (switch / power intake)?
Do I need to replace this unit?

[pyroboarder]

I'm having this exact same problem, it would seem that the continuous blinking power light means that it's never fully booting up....

i bought this less then 3 days ago, used it for 3 days straight transfering data onto it, and now it won't work. I don't want to send it back, is there anyway to do a hard reset, I wouldn't even mind losing all the data. Is there anything I can do, or am i going to have to send it back?

Any response would be more than appreciated.... Thanks

[Perplexed25]

Hey: I tried to respond to your problem, but it ended up being a new thread - "that dang green light won't stop blinking."  I don't have an answer, but you can read what I wrote.  And, I am in desparate need for a solution, too.  Have you figured it out?

[BenFragged]

I have the same 1TB Maxtor Shared Storage II drive and recently it started exhibiting the same problem.  The top power light on the front panel blinks constantly and never stops blinking.  The power light on the back remains full green all the time.  I have tried rebooting the drive several times with no change.  The front power light just never stops blinking and I can't locate the drive even when I reloaded all the software again.  What is the solution or is there one, other than buying a new drive? 

[SDBob]

If anybody has an idea how to overcome the blinking green light and get the thing to work again, I'd love to hear it.



(Edited by AlanM)


Message Edited by AlanM on 09-12-2008 01:59 PM

[edrivas]

Mine is doing the same also. How do we repair it. I just got this one as a replacement as the other ones (2) have fried. This is a new one.

[SDBob]

Nothing you can do that I can tell except return the POS...Seagate doesn't want you to know this so it's likely my message will be deleted by the moderator.  Still trying to figure how to get 150gb off my non working MSS unit... Seagate offered to do it for 800 bucks...nice racket, dont you think?

[AlanM]

SDBob:

Take another look at the reasons I gave you for editing your post(s) and you'll see that you have misrepresented the criteria for edition.  I urge you to pay better attention. 

[bfee]

After reading the posts from others I bought a new unit and tried just swapping out the power cord. After a minute or so SUCCESS!!! PROBLEM SOLVED.

[Bas]

I also have the exact same problem as described above. I have been using the machine for less than 6 month. 

I have another Maxtor SSD (still working) with the same adaptor/power cord. However when I connect this to the malfunctioning SSD the problem is the same: topled blinking green all the time and drive doesn't seem to boot properly. It comes into a loop of constantly restarting. I hope I can still recover my data. Any other possible solutions are welcome!

Message Edited by Bas on 03-02-2009 03:55 AM

[sv7nsson]

I've been having the exact same problem described above. It seems like this is a pretty common fail, but I can't believe that there's no documentation from Seagate. Anyone figure this one out?? Hello Seagate????

[Poppin Media]

I am going to add my 2-cents here also.  My first 1TB Maxtor Shared Storage II lasted a few months and died.  I got a 'refurbished' replacement and it lasted less than a month.  I had a 300GB shared storage on the netword that also died one day later.  120GB of digitized video files lost (6 months work).  The one drive was backing up the other and now I am looking at big bucks for data recovery.  Maxtor has a lemon here and they should do the recovery for free IMHOP.  I have the same problem with the green blinking top light with a period of clicking (tick-tock) repeating. There are 2 quick amber flashes and the cycle repeats.  It is very noisy also (fan?) sounds sick!  I am avoiding Maxtor/Seagate from now on. 

[moggy91au]

I am feeling quite sick at the moment. I have hundreds of photos on my Maxtor portable storage drive and today everytime I plug it in it won't load and my computer freezes. No idea what to do.

[malkaul]

Hi,

I have also suddenly started having the problem with the blinking green light on my Maxtor Shared Storage II 1TB NAS box.  I also can no longer access it on my network, eventhough the network port on the back suggests that there is activity and the connection on the router appears to be active.

Did anyone actually get a solution from Seagate\Maxtor that doesn't involve buying a new box?  I have had mine a while now and it is out of warranty but I didn't expect it to breakdown so quickly.

Thanks

Mal

[moggy91au]

I took my Maxtor into a computer repairer and it booted up straight away, so now I have to take my computer in and have it checked. Might be just my computer. At least I know I can get my photos back.

[dutch046]

I started having the same problems today.  Stumbled upon this forum and it seems Maxtor/Seagate has a lemon.  Their refusal to acknowledge an underlying problem will come back to haunt them.  As a lawyer I'm smelling a class action lawsuit...I

[malkaul]

I ended up having to rip open the box on my MSS II and now I am trying to find some software that will actually let me get to my data as it seems there might have been something screwy about the way Maxtor configures RAID 1 on these devices

[EasyUser]

The top light indicates the power, maybe you should try to use another power adapter.  The author of the following link indicated and solve this issue.

http://antariksa.web.id/blog/?p=262

[malkaul]

Having ripped open the NAS housing and finally got to my disks, I can now confirm that Maxtor products are a complete waste of money and you would be better spending a little more to get a better product.  The reason I have come to this conclusion is that in order to recover my data from the RAID 1 setup (which should just be a basic mirror and therefore simple to recover) I will have to pay almost as much for the recovery software license as I did to buy the unit in the first place.

My advice to anyone considering maxtor NAS products is DO NOT BUY IT! Go pay a little extra for a decent product

[edrivas411]

Hey guys this is a dumb issue and I have found how to correct it. Just DO NOT plug in the ethernet till after it has booted. I ussually just wait 5 minutes then plug in the ethernet cable. Works everytime. My only problem is that Vista will not auto map the drive and I must map the drive each time on all my machines. I have it password protected so when I map it I must log into the drive. Any suggestions please post. I have already changed administrator settings globally in the services.

[EasyUser]

Malkaul, can't agree with you more.  Seagate/Maxtor created this very strange product called MSSII.  You need to backup your RAID 1, otherwise if one of the disk fails, you will be better off to buy a new product than go through the warranty process.

[malkaul]

I wonder if anyone from Maxtor\Seagate actually monitors these forums and can maybe explain why it is likely that people will have to pay at least $250 if their RAID1 NAS fails, when the whole point of RAID 1 is that there are 2 independent disks that have the same data on them but should not be reliant on each other to work.

By the way, I did also try the not connecting the ethernet cable to the box idea before I ripped it open and it didn't work for me, it just seems that something in the NAS unit itself was not quite right and was causing it to constantly restart and therefore never allowing the disks to start up properly.

[EasyUser]

I wonder how MSSII was actually designed and tested.  The funny thing was that when RAID 1 was configured, if one drive fails, even if you take out the failed drive, it won't started while my other nas enclosure from another company will started with one drive under RAID 1.  This feature simply make RAID 1 configuration other than reduce your capacity, not that useful at all.

[deesbek]

Could not agree more.  Especially since Raid1 is simple mirroring, the rebuild should start automatically without any user input at all, all NAS I have worked with in the past has worked this way. 

Not naming any vendors although it was not Seagate, the disk failures were very common and the rebuilds took for ever.  I remember rebuilding a RAID5 set with a few failures in it - very painful, put in a new disk, wait 6 hours for the rebuild, do the same for the next two failed disks. 

[kdk1720]

I had this same problem just this week.  I used a 12VDC3A transformer from another drive and had partial success booting - well at least the drives started to spin for about 15 seconds.  This confirmed to me that it was a power problem and not a boot disk failure.  I had that happen last year and that is another story - luckily I had a back up USB drive connected with a good back up handy - recovery did work well.  Back to the power problem.  After an e-mail to support without a resolution I went to a local computer/electronics/network store here in Dallas (Altex - you can find them online) to find a 12VDC replacement power adapter.  They had the ticket - a 12VDC-5A (regulated) unit that will supply as much current as needed up to 5A.  $40 later - I brought it home plugged it in and the disks spun up immediately, the drive is back online and working fine.  After trying to recover the EXT3 partition during the failure I 've decided to wipe it and use that drive as additional storage.  I'll configure a back up and just copy the contents from one drive to another - yes more work but at least I will not be tied to the MSS drive any longer. If something else goes wrong I'll just cannablelize the unit for the drives and cut my losses.  After looking around online you can find other transformers online cheaper if you are willing to wait - unfortunately I had important files that I couldn't wait to recover.  Hope this helps!!

[DanD]

As with you all, I too have the same problem 1TB drive (raid 0).  The drive's just over a year old and the top light is going nuts.

I've tried swapping the power cord with another identical one, no joy.

I've unplugged the Ethernet cable and powering on, again no joy.

I have a backup of everything but some movies that were downloaded a 300GB USB drive and I'm hoping that that is not corrupt.

I paid the $19 to get the replacement drive shipped before I have to send mine back.  They're not getting it till I know that I can restore the data from the proprietary backup.

1) Has anyone used the i365 data recovery service?  If so roughly how much was the cost and were they fairly successful?

2) What other method of data backup do you use?  I don't like the proprietary backup software as you can't recover till you get a replacement MAXTOR/SEAGATE drive.  I'd love to restore some data from the backup NOW but I have to wait a few days till the new drive is couriered.

3) Does anyone know of another NAS where the drive has CLONEing capability.  Having TWO separate units spinning would be ideal.  What good is a RAID (although I don't use the RAID capability) if the power supply or controller fails.  Having a cloned disk would allow you to get back and running fast.  Worse case you lose the data since your last clone process.

Message Edited by DanD on 09-07-2009 10:27 AM

[EasyUser]

Look into this thread http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=mss&thread.id=1587, the op successfully recovered her data from a raid 0 configured unit.

You mentioned your unit was configured as raid 0, in that case, failure of either drive will cause your data unrecoverable, because data were divided between the two drives.  The best configuration should be raid 1, which have data replicated between the two drives, if one fails, you still have a full copy on the other.  The beauty of raid 1 is that you don't even need to backup your data since it is backup all the time.

[DanD]

Mine will not boot so I am unable to access the drive using the Linux method.  Beside, I believe what they did may void the warranty.

I was interested in the capacity of the drive not so much the RAID capability. 

Besides, if the controller or power supply fails you can't get at either drive so you still should have an external backup.

I also believe you're incorrect.  For this device, I believe when it's configured as RAID 0 it fills one drive then the other.  Files aren't split across drives unless you have a file > 1/2 the capacity..

Message Edited by DanD on 09-07-2009 12:09 PM

[EasyUser]

Here is some information that explains how different raid works http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID.

[DanD]

After working with computers for over 35 years I do know a little about them.  There's no need for a lesson.

I did read on this site that the Maxtor Shared Storage II is not a typical RAID.   It fills one volume then the next.

Also, even in RAID 1 mode, if access to the unit or power fails you're SOL.  Backup is ALWAYS necessary.

[EasyUser]

Here is what I found out about RAID 1 mode.  I bought MSSII at seagate clearance sale.  Two weeks after I bought it, the unit wouldn't start, I could hear clicky noise, which indiated hard drive failure.  I didn't care about the warrenty, I opened up the unit and retrieved both drives.  I sent back the bad drive for warrenty replacement and plugged the good drive into a hard drive docking.  Booted up my computer with Slax liveCD, the hard drive in docking was mounted immediately.  In the mounted drive, there was a directory called Public, in this directory every single file was there, I moved all of them to a external USB hard drive.  Once I got the replacement back from seagate, I rebuild the the system according some post on the web, and copied back every file from the external USB hard drive.  The unit has been working since.  Basically by using raid 1, I avoided SOL.

[vivsbears]

I am having the same top light blinking problem.  I have seen on forums for other drives that people have opened the drives, installed the physical hard drive into their desktop machines, and with use of some software for mounting Linux drives, managed to get their data copied off.

  Could someone with knowledge of how to do this, please post here?  There seem to be many of us in the same boat (and of course few of us back up as often as we should!)  If this will infact help, there are many of us who can benefit.  For those without the technical expertise to do it, we probably have a friend or colleague who can handle it or help us out.  But knowing what to do, which software to install and parameters to give it to get it to read the drive, would be invaluable to many of us!

I also ready that linux disc repair utilities might be of use.  Which ones, and how are they used?

(for the record, my machine is running windoze XP Pro, not Linux as I would prefer, so I need notes accordingly =)

[EasyUser]

If yours is configured as Raid 1, the easiest way is to put the good hard drive into your computer or external docking, boot your computer with a Linux LiveCD.  I used Slax LiveCD.  Now your computer is running linux, you can copy data to a safe place.  If yours is configured as Raid 0, if one of the hard drive failed, it is almost impossible to recovery the data.

[DanD]

EasyUser's suggestion is a very good one.  Follow it and you should be recover your all your data.

The one exception is that if you're running raid 0 the data is NOT scattered amongst the two drives, it will be

entirely on one drive or the other.  This drive is not a true RAID but rather just two drives being managed in

serial mode.  All that means is that you should be able to recover your data by recovering the two drives.

A little more work but if you don't have backup it's worth it.

After it's recovered, buy a different drive ;-)   These ones seem to be falling apart left and right.

[Fjalle]

How do I know if I running a RAID 0 or a RAID 1 configuration?

[EasyUser]

On admin web site, under advanced features->disk configuration, linear means raid0, mirror means raid1.

[Fjalle]

Ok, thx.

But the problem is that I have the same problem like everyone else so I cant access my disk  

Is there a way to find out the raid config without accessing the mss2 disk?

[RetardedGoat]

Switching out the power supply for a 12V/4.5A I had laying around worked for me.  It now blinks 1 green and then 3 amber.  But I was able to access the drive and pull all of my data off.  Whew!!!

Thanks for the tip about switching out the power supply.  It was a life saver!

[iainhu]

Well I have a similar tale to the others here. My MSS unit is (thankfully) a 500Gb single disk unit with no RAID, so that's one complication saved. Symptoms are as others describe:

1. Unit will not boot with power light continuing to flash green, then amber before going back to green
2. The unit does not respond to the power button - plug in and the unit is instantly on - the only way to stop is to pull the power
3. The unit does not respond to the hard reset

I don't believe there is an issue with the actual disk. The unit's fan can be noisy and has been for a while, quietening after a while of being on, but I believe (maybe incorrectly!) that the drive itself is okay. My suspicion is the controller board as it's impossible to communicate with the box. If the controller were okay and the disk bad, I'd expect to be able to communicate and get disk access errors, but I can't even communicate with the box via any means. It simply isn't on the network although the NIC is operating...or at least the NIC connection and data lights are working.

The trigger for this failure was sustained data transfer. I had 'some fun' with the unit a couple of months ago, got it back (can't remember precisely how!), did a firmware update on the unit (only a minor point release) and that seemed to make things better, but prior to this is was always larger/multiple file copies that would cause the unit to go offline. Anyway, all fixed with the firmware update. However, I was then away for a month, came home forgetting about these problems, started to copy over a bunch of photos and bang...the unit failed with me at first thinking it was Windows on the client as I started to get file access errors. Turned out not to be the client, but the MSS back to its bad old behaviour and clearly the firmware update hadn't helped anything much.

So from reading this forum and other pieces I got a replacement 12V5A power source based on some peolpe's experiences, but no luck. Have tried booting with no network connected, but again no luck. Now trying cooling the unit in a freezer (locked in an airtight bag) to see if that might reset any NVM, but I have my doubts. Suspect I am heading towards breaking the unit open, removing the disk, putting into a Win7 machine, loading Ext2 IFS and so mounting the disk, will copy everything off, reformat as NTFS and then simply use as additional internal storage.

I guess reading all this the thing that really strikes me is the total absense of comment/advice/support from Seagate. The only action I've seen from Seagate is to delete/edit some peoples comments, presumably as they were considered too 'colourful' in their post. So if there is anyone from Seagate reading this, just note that the total lack of support or advice from Seagate looks really really bad, as in REALLY bad. It results in this just becoming a user complaint board. Instead of suggestions and fixes from Seagate and other users chipping in success stories, there is no support and no advice from Seagate and moastly nothing but complaints from users stuck with data lost on failed units. So here's a little feedback for the Seagate Marketing Director; the lack of Seagate support in this forum really reflects badly on the company and so it's products. Remember, customers are hard one and easily lost, and the lack of attention to this forum at least in my opinion, is an easy loss of customers. I'd not like to guess the propensity of most posters here to buy Seagate again, whereas a little well placed support and advice could turn this into a superd service.

[Soniashope]

Thanks for sharing your experience with the Maxtor storage unit. I am looking for just such a product but do not have all the knowledge that you seem to have to trouble shoot problems. Seagate must still sell a lot of these in spite of the trouble people seem to have, otherwise why would they ignore the issue?

Switching the power cord seems to be the answer in some instances but it would be very good to solve the problem once and for all.

[iainhu]

Well I have just invested in a Syology box. This came with very good reviews and recommendations in various magazines. It's purely a case and controller and you buy uour own disks and this is a twin disk unit, so I've bounght 2x 2Tb disks, set them up as RAID 1 (mirrored data so both are a copy of each other...one disk goes bad and you can take out and replace the failed disk and it will all rebuild itself).

So far so good. Seems to work nicely and the management interface via a browser is a lot nicer than the old Maxstor UI. The box also seems to be capable of a lot more. More fiddling and setup to do, but so far so good and I have the NAS working and even nicely partitioned so different users can only access different bits, e.g. the kids do not have access to parent's stuff!

It's now down to taking the old 500Mb unit to pieces and seeing if I can salvage anything from that. The 'new power supply' solution hasn't worked for me and nor have the 'power up with no network connection'. Having got the thing into pieces I'm sure the 'jump start the disks off a separate 5v power supply' solution also won't work as the disk spins up. I've also tried the 'couple of hours in the freezer' solution and that didn't work either!

I am suspecting the disk is good and see it's a Barracuda 7200 unit...quite a nice drive in fact. I can see it beoming a secondary HDD in a desktop PC, and maybe on the way I'll recover some data. I suspect though that it'll need to be the Ext2 IFS solution, but we wait to see if that'll work!

[Linton9]

Gday,

I have the same drive MSSII 1TB...

Its in span mode, so I have 1TB of space and I'm trying to copy all the data off so I can retire this drive.

The problem I'm having is it seems some files cannot be read after a certain point.

Windows 7 returns the error 'invalid file handle'

Windows Commander (under win7) can't write to the destination drive (which seems like an odd error)

OSX asks for a username and password and then says I dont have permission to access the file.

The power LED is doing the green-orange sequence.

I've removed all user accounts...

I can still see all my files, but I just can't copy them from the drive.

How can I retrieve my data?
Are some of these files spanned between discs? If so will I be able to retrieve these spanned files if I physically remove the disks and mount under linux? 

Thanks for your help.

[AskTheLeaf]

The Maxtor Shared Storage II isn't supported with Windows 7.

Do you have another computer that has an older operating system installed on it, such as Windows XP? If so, do you receive the same error message?

[gibran.samuel]

I have a Maxtor Shared Storage II 500 GB with very similar issue.

The drive was working fine until I turned it off.

Ok! so this is what I was getting

1) Green blinking power light when I turn the drive on drive. Occasionally it will throw in an amber light for fun. 

2) The drive will not respond to reset and power button. You will get an amber light if you hold it long enough but it won’t do what it is supposed to.

3) The Network light works fine, when you unplug and plug the device.

4) The dive light comes up green and blinks occasionally also just to make your life a little exiting.

Ok! so this is what I think is going on with the drive.

The power supply is lemon. It just goes weak over time. It can sustain the power to keep the drive up but not boot the system. So when you turn the device on it does not get enough juice to properly boot the full system. I have seen this same issue in desktops with a bad power supply.

Ok! so this is what I did to determine the supply is bad.

I took the bad power supply and plugged it in another Maxtor Plus that also came with the same supply. The drive got power but never properly turned on - similarly to the issue I was having with Maxtor II. Then I used the good supply from Maxtor Plus and plugged it in my Maxtor II and everything came back up. In the troubleshooting process I have reset the drive many times but that never happened therefore I suppose the buttons were not working. 

The fact that Maxtor does not provide any input on this issue makes them look very, very, very bad.

Keep trying until your brain starts frying. 

Good luck,

GS

[Mel0en]

Same issue here and it seems to be fixed now. Before you try one of my solutions, please be aware that these are at your own risk and the possibility exists that your MSSII will get fried and/or damaged and/or waranty can be void. I've recovered data from the drives several times in several ways, so I can take a risk. If you don't know what you're doing or don't know how to recover data from linux-formatted disks please stop reading.

Anyway, ever since I got my MSS I've had problems. The device needed resets (hard and soft) frequently and I've already needed to replace the power adapter in the past. Since a few days the blinking issue occured again, the device doesn't finish it's boot procedure fully and resets itself. I've tried replacing the power adapter witth two 12V/3A adapters, both didn't work. I took a wild guess and tried a universal power adapter (15V) and the device booted up and is running again! I'm not sure how much damage the 15V will do to the device, but I'll see. I will look for a replacement adapter in a few days.

On my road to solution I've ran into the follwing possible solutions:

- Replace power adapter (12V/5A or 15V at your own risk)

- "Now after several trials, i opened the box, removed the disk package, and got to the board. there's a little batterie which i removed for like 3 minutes, then put it back in. put the disk package back in place and .... BINGO ... it booted nicely."

- Swap SATA connectors: http://www.suphammer.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1078&p=5174&hilit=factory+reset#p5174

The suphammer site was previously known as http://www.openmss.org/ , a very good source of information on our devices. Unfortunately, things got a little quiet over there. Hopefully my posts helps other users who have issues with their MSSII, I know how it feels to losse all your precious data. My advice is to always use the MSSII in RAID1 config, always backup files and if the device gets broken, an IT guy with experience in recovering Linux data is highly likely to be able to recover your data.