Recover a system drive that's full

[bconnor218]

Hi Everyone,

I believe my system drive ran out of space somehow and my NAS won't boot up now. I'm trying to find out if there is a way I can mount the drive standalone and clean it up. I have an external SATA to USB drive chassis, so I can connect it like and external to either Windows or the TNAS. I also have another larger drive that's ready to go as a replacement system drive, if I need to instead just recover the config from the old drive. I thought I had a backup of the config, but apparently it got deleted at some point.

Any ideas or help are much appreciated. I'm a total Linux dummy, so Im limited in my command line abilities. Thank you all in advance!

[Gremlin]

I'm a total Linux dummy,

So, in that case, I don't suppose there is any point asking which model of nas you have, which version of TOS is installed or whether you have tried to update TOS at some point.

[bconnor218]

Sorry that's all relevant info I suppose, lol. It's a F5-221, running TOS 5.1. I keep it patched and updated.

[TMlinda]

Can you log in to the TOS system now? Log in through the web page or SSH.

[Gremlin]

Good stuff. In the meantime I did glance at your previous posts and see that you started out running TOS4. So, at some point, you must have upgraded the OS to TOS5. Did you ensure, at the time, that you had the proper 8GB of system space? (TOS4 only installed 2GB space).

Now the harder (??) question(s) - why do you think the "system drive" ran out of space? Simply because the system will not boot? More to the point, what do you mean by "system drive"? (It means different things to different people and I take your initial statement at face value.) What file system did you choose to install? Ext4/BTRFS? Did you opt for Raid (which?) or single disks.

The basic answer to your initial question is "No, you cannot mount 'the drive' stand-alone in a sata/usb enclosure". (Hint, there is no single, definable os drive in a current TOS system)

[bconnor218]

Can you log in to the TOS system now? Log in through the web page or SSH.

No, the web page doesn't load, but I do seem to be able to SSH in.

[bconnor218]

Good stuff. In the meantime I did glance at your previous posts and see that you started out running TOS4. So, at some point, you must have upgraded the OS to TOS5. Did you ensure, at the time, that you had the proper 8GB of system space? (TOS4 only installed 2GB space).

Now the harder (??) question(s) - why do you think the "system drive" ran out of space? Simply because the system will not boot? More to the point, what do you mean by "system drive"? (It means different things to different people and I take your initial statement at face value.) What file system did you choose to install? Ext4/BTRFS? Did you opt for Raid (which?) or single disks.

The basic answer to your initial question is "No, you cannot mount 'the drive' stand-alone in a sata/usb enclosure". (Hint, there is no single, definable os drive in a current TOS system)

Yeah for sure. It's a BTRFS file system on a single disk with 500GB total size. Right before it crashed it was making a lot of noise so I connected in and saw that the Volume1 was at like 100% used space. Then my login timed out and when I tried to login again it said user wasn't recognized. Then I rebooted and the web login page won't come up. Just says Loading, Please Wait.... forever. Like I left it there for a couple of days because I was busy and I had read to leave it in case it was doing a file system repair.

[Gremlin]

Wow! Possible more than 1 issue. Is the 500GB drive fairly old and put in for testing the nas (or for some similar reason)? Maybe just tired. Running btrfs snapshots can consume drive space if the space gets changed frequently or the snapshot tasks are changed ('orphaned snapshots').

Do you have valuable data on the drive that has not been backed up? If not (ie nothing on drive to be kept) it may be most practical, time effective to put in a new(er) hdd and start again with install of latest Tos5.1 os. Do NOT let the default (Tos4) install. Use "custom" install.

Otherwise you may need to get inside the system and (again taking your initial statement) get some live help from support techs.

[ColaChen]

Judging from your feedback, it is still difficult to locate the cause of the problem. In order to help you solve this problem more efficiently, we will arrange for remote service support to ensure that the problem can be dealt with in a timely manner.

[bconnor218]

Judging from your feedback, it is still difficult to locate the cause of the problem. In order to help you solve this problem more efficiently, we will arrange for remote service support to ensure that the problem can be dealt with in a timely manner.

That would be so helpful! Thank you very much