[rpmurray]

The latest news.

After labeling all four drives I've run SpinRite on all of them. Each was given a clean bill of health with all sectors OK. The SMART display gets kind of scary because it shows these large numbers for ecc correctable and seek errors, but checking on the SpinRite discussion forum it looks like these are expected on Seagate drives.

The drives are Barracuda 7200.9 ST3160812A (160GB) and Barracuda 7200.7 ST3160023A (160GB), 2 of each. They've been running fine for the last couple of years so I don't think my problem is related to having the two different mechanisms.

I have replacements on the way so I can make sector clones of these and then I'll see what else I can try to resurrect the 4100 from the dead. The odd thing, as I mentioned before, is that after starting the Repair All Errors and getting the panic about ten minutes into the repair, every time I've tried to start up the 4100 since then and access the web config pages has been meet with a "No Network Shares" and asking for the username/password over and over again. I can't get to the debug page so I can do an "info dev" or check the logs.

So, these are the ideas I have.

1) Maybe the battery is dead, and I need to replace it (this I'll be doing anyway). I don't know if that's enough to keep me from being able to access the unit.
2) Maybe the settings have been corrupted and I need to reset the unit before I can log on again. I'll hold off on this until I've made the copies of the drives.
3) Maybe the Repair All Errors is running into some kind of problem doing the repair. Based on the Disk LEDs it seems to be running this every time I start it up, and roughly ten minutes into it the Disk 1 LED lights solid and the System LED starts blinking rapidly indicating a panic. If this is the case, would removing one of the drives put it into a situation where it would be able to come up in degraded mode, or would it still be giving the error? This is something I'll test once I've made the copies of the drives.

While SpinRite is giving all the drives a clean bill of health, Drive 1 on the SMART screen seems to show fewer seek errors than the others but more ecc corrections. So I'm wondering if this is a situation where the drive is reaching a timeout in how long the RAID will wait for the drive to recover from an ecc correction. I believe that Western Digital drives in their non-enterprise versions sometimes suffer from this in RAIDs, so this should be true of Seagates also.

If anyone wants to chime in with any ideas I'll give those a try also. This is my last Snap 4100 and it was kind of handy to keep because I could toss Mac or PC files on it and access it from anywhere. I'm going to the trouble of trying to fix this one because I really hate to give up on it until I've tried everything. I'm not in need of data recovery because it was backed up.