Hello activemind
As it happens I’ve already tried this… 
First thing I did was to remove the new memory modules. Second was to put the original modules back in. Third was to remove all drives and boot her empty - same result everytime… i.e. it didn’t change anything and the blue Power Light remained blinking until I forced it to power down again after about 30 mins each time.
Really oddly, I’ve received an email notification from the forum that a user posted a reply, but I can’t find it in the thread!
The reply simply said:
"Had the same problem and fixed it with UART."
Anybody know what this is - or how to (possibly) fix it with UART?
Many thanks
Hello Cerberus
Thank you!
I don’t mind admitting that I was slightly nervous, but followed your instructions, and the PR4100 has now come back to life and appears to be working!
I found the following few details as I was progressing through your instructions - that might help some others:
I found that as I was booting up the NAS for the first time with the newly created rescue USB inserted, the power light was blinking red, instead of blinking blue as it was booting.
As the NAS was booting, although the fans were still going for it, I could see that the disk activity lights were blinking, and I could audibly hear disk activity (which I couldn’t whilst it stuck in it’s previous non-booting loop / boot failure - previously there was no disk light blinking/flashing activity and no audible disk activity either).
It was fortunate that the NAS still booted up to the fixed IP that I had previously set for it, as it wasn’t appearing on either the ARP Cache list or LAN device list on my Draytek router. You were right, that the NAS seemed to recognize that the NAS software appeared to be corrupted and when I went to the IP address of the NAS, it did indeed show the “safe mode” page and was looking for me to re-upload the OS5 firmware.
After the OS5 re-uploaded, it auto rebooted, however, there was nothing to actually tell me when that reboot process had completed. There was nothing on the web-browser screen (it simply continued to display; “Your device is rebooting, do not unplug it”) - and there was no message on the display of the NAS itself whatsoever either to indicate that it was or had rebooted. However, I noticed that the power light starting blinking red again after about 10 minutes.
Therefore, I gave it another 5 mins, just to try to be sure and then powered the NAS down to be able to remove the recovery USB.
It booted back up first time, the fan calmed itself down after about 5 mins, all of the drive activity sequencing was back to normal for a normal boot-up, and whilst it probably took a little longer than normal to get to a fully booted state (probably about 7/8 mins) it got there and is running stably.
It’s about 0140, so I’ll power it down now, and attempt to reinstall the upgraded memory modules again tomorrow and hopefully all be well.
I’ve just got one question…
If this should ever happen again - however - if it were to happen again with the NAS full of data, does this recovery sequence that we’ve just performed not affect/delete any data that might be on the drives at the future point in time?
What I mean to ask is - this time, I didn’t care as there was no data at all on any of the drives, so nothing to lose (data wise). Should this process work in the same way if there’s data on the drives? I have my WD drives set up with RAID10.
Many thanks again for your help. It’s really appreciated.
By the way, all of your posts that I have been following, have been removed/deleted from this thread?!
Thank you for your reply Cerberus.
I certainly didn’t vanish or ghost you. What actually happened was that my wife managed to bring Covid into the household and it’s wiped us all out for just over a week! I’ve only really been up and running again in the last 2-3 days.
Ok, so I’ve just gone to try to upgrade the memory modules again, and the reboot has failed again! I think it’s pretty clear that these memory chips are the cause of why the NAS behaved as it did. The NAS has been powered up and running for about 30 mins with the new chips in, and it’s just at the blinking blue light with fans on full and doing nothing at all. It’s not reachable at it’s known IP address, and it’s not possible to toggle through the display on the NAS itself.
I’ve installed 2x Kingston KVR16LS11/8 chips, which I checked on the WD approved list of chips before I purchased them to make double-sure that they were correct here:
The chips were brand new and sealed and anti-static bags. Therefore, is it reasonable to assume that one or both of the chips are either faulty or fake?
I’m now going to have to power it down and complete the restoration process again with the original 2x Innodisk memory modules back in place.
Many thanks
I’ve never had much luck with Kingston RAM. Try Crucial instead. The RAM must be DDR3L and installed in matched pairs.
Yes, they were a brand new, matched pair of Kingston chips. They’ll be on their way back shortly…
I’ll give Crucial a go - all that matters is that it works!
Slightly offtopic:
Why do you need “matched pairs”? If the spec is the same (i.e. speed and type); shouldn’t you be able to mix and match? Supposedly; if you put in “Faster” ram; a system will run at “the slowest” speed.
I ask this question as it relates to a PC where I recently went from 1 stick to 2 sticks of RAM. Through of series of errors; I ended up installing 2 new sticks of matched RAM. (root cause was the OEM vendor quoting what they had as opposed to what I needed)
I am wondering if I could have gotten away with a single new stick in parallel with the existing stick. (both having the same specs in terms if I/O; Bus speed; ECC etc) (I am not losing sleep either way- - → as the RAM wasn’t THAT expensive; and the new sticks seem to be working fine)
(The biggest problem was I triggered Bit Locker. A 48 digit key?? Seriously?? You know I dumped that option as soon as I got the system back running properly)
Hello all,
What wound up working? It seems several posts have been deleted.
Cerberus,
Could you let me know what procedure you sent to rjsdavis?
Does similar USB rescue capability exist for an EX2 Ultra?
Care to share?
I have some SSH skills (although I am not a skilled Linux user); and I did successfully execute the instructions you provided to roll O/S 5 back to O/S 3 back in the day.
Take your time.
My units are perfectly functional at the minute.
Happy holidays.
I have the same issue, how to get rescue firmware
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