TerraMaster Forum

A colleague of mine has been telling me for several months now that his F2-221 keeps failing. He sets it up, finds he can only intermittently copy files to it and subsequently discovers it seems to be denying him access altogether.

As I'm running a pair of Terramaster NASes rather successfully, my natural assumption was user error. With an inevitable air of superiority I invited him to bring his F2-221 over to my place so I could fix him up in a trice.

That didn't happen.

We started afresh, pulling the drives and installing the current default TOS 5. I set the machine up with an admin username (not "admin") and password, accessed the TOS 5 file system and created a shared directory, about to demonstrate the ease with which one could copy files across the LAN onto the NAS.

That didn't happen either.

I'd cheated by opening up all the permissions to the new shared directory. But sending files to it generated an "insufficient space error". I managed to squeeze part of one gigabyte-sized file onto it, and copying a couple of small directories created the directories on the NAS but they remained empty. This left me puzzling long enough for my colleague to decide it was time to go. He would put the machine away in a cupboard "…until there's a version of TOS that actually works."

I suggested he leave the machine with me and I'd work out what stupid thing the pair of us were missing. He went home and I turned back to the F2-221. On signing in with the user/pass we'd set up, TOS responded with "User not exists".

I checked the user name and password—no, I had them correct. After several tries with different Web browsers it dawned on me that we had been going through the exact battlefield he'd been describing to me for the past few months. Failure to copy files to the NAS. Sudden, complete lack of access.

It had been my assumption that the fact of being able to start afresh with a new installation and no errors demonstrated that the hardware at least was without fault. But now I wonder.

The TOS boot loader and—I presume—system parameters are stored on an internal USB stick. If that were faulty, could the subsequent loss of metadata be an explanation for what he'd been going through months previously and I have witnessed today?

What does the team think?

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Chris

I'd been hoping for some kind of response to this. Users who've had the same problem, perhaps. And/or suggestions for a solution. Corrections to or affirmations of my conjecture that system parameters like usernames and passwords are kept with the TOS 5 firmware on the USB stick.

Is this a hardware fault, as I suggest? If so, is a full replacement of the F2-221 necessary, or would replacing the system USB stick fix it? Perhaps there's some way of flashing the USB stick with known-good firmware from another F2-221. Or, if the USB stick is physically faulty, its replacement by a generic USB stick. What are the bounds of possibility here?

Things not working as expected are, quite understandably, the bane of people like my colleague. But they're the engine of scientific enquiry. Every failure is a rung on the ladder to discovery.

Help me up the ladder a bit.

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Chris

As you can install TOS 5, and you can even create an "admin account", it may talk about the supersuer. So I can tell, there is nothing wrong with the hardware, and USB initboot. You can try reinstalling the TOS with a new drive. I think all the issues may be related to the drives.