Resurrecting a Buffalo Terastation Pro V2

We have a Buffalo Terastation Pro V2 4TB that we bought at work 7 or 8 years ago (for a lot of money) which has been a champ.  We use it for storing backups and migrating data.

While other machines have lost disks and failed boards, this thing JUST KEEPS GOING.

Its not the smallest, but its got a good size fan and its really quiet.

So when I wanted to upgrade my data redundancy at home, and I stumbled on one without disks cheap on eBay, I bought it.  I liked that it can sit quietly in the office and just house data from the various machines I use.

Since I'm prone to reconfiguring hardware and trying out different OSes, storing data locally is a pain.


I figured like every other NAS product I've worked with, that the firmware was on some internal flash memory, and I'd just pop some disks in and configure an array be up and running.

Not so much.

It uses an ARM 9 processor with a *NIX variant as the OS, and the OS is stored ON the array disks.  So, without the array disks, you have... ALMOST nothing.

Fortunately, the Buffalo devices have a strong community following, so I was able to gleam what I needed by reading about 20 articles from various forums.

Most Buffalo devices have an "Emergency Mode" where they'll actually TRY and download the boot files from an FTP server on your lan if they can't find them on the disk, so there was hope!

The process was, essentially -

• Boot the device using a local FTP server to ensure it would boot.
• Try pushing the firmware to the device once booted.
• When pushing the firmware failed, try manually building the boot files on the primary disk by mounting the primary boot disk in Linux and extracting the images from the firmware update file.
• When that worked and it booted, try pushing the latest firmware with some hacks to force it to "rebuild" all the boot files on the various disks.
• When that failed, do more research, discover you actually need all 4 drives, scrounge up more drives and re-boot.
• Try pushing firmware again, when that works, celebrate.
• Configure the Arrays and put it in production

I used various articles to do this.  These have most of the information.  The others were redundant, but helped me understand the process and the device - and reinforced what I was deducing between the lines.

http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Terastation_Recovery#EM_Mode

http://forums.buffalotech.com/index.php?topic=79.0

http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Revive_your_arm9_box_from_scratch

http://forums.buffalotech.com/index.php?topic=17359.0

http://supportingtech.blogspot.com/2014/01/recreating-disk-array-change-from-raid.html

http://supportingtech.blogspot.com/2014/01/how-to-upgrade-and-add-larger-disks-to.html

http://downloads.buffalo.nas-central.org/TOOLS/ALL_LS_KB_ARM9/ACP_COMMANDER/OLD/README.TXT

At each step, I kept getting these ACP errors.  There are some tutorials out there about ACP Commander (a Java app) which purports to fix them - but it never worked for me.  I think I never had the "right" scenario for the error (despite having the right error).  The problem is... there are so many variants of Buffalo NAS, your error may be right and the tool may be right, but for a different product.

I was estatic after I built the boot disk on Ubuntu and was able to get it to boot without the TFtp Server, only to get that same ACP_State_failure error.  After mostly said and done, It still wouldn't work.  I only had 2 disks and this ships with /  typically uses 4.  I figured, like most other  NAS products, as long as I met the minimum to add an Array (in this case, a mirror), I'd be good.

Nope.

I found a thread, which I can't find now, but essentially learned that it was a pain to get it to work on less than 4 disks, and that the error I was getting - ACP_STATE_FAILURE -  was possibly related.

Well, these shipped with either 500gb or 1tb drives, and I struggled to find anything bigger than a 250, till I found a pair of 750s in an old machine I had laying around.

I quick wiped them and popped them in.

Bingo.  Booted and the firmware update worked like a champ.  A few minutes figuring out how to switch from Japanese to English on the console and i was in Business.

I was able to create a pair of mirrors on two different size drives with no problem.

Yeah, this doesn't have a lot of the newer features like built in DNLA, mobile app syncing, Private Cloud and the like, but I value stability and security over features - and for the price, it was just right.

And I know that it should soldier on for years.  Yeah, I may need to replace the PSU board and Fan... but the processor and memory are simple - particularly since the files are actually on the disks!

The D-Link DNS-320 this replaces has a ton of features, but its fragile.  Its clunky to setup.  The shares sometimes show-up then disappear.  Its REALLY hard for the Mac and Linux to see the shares. Sustained transfers from the Mac and Linux are hard, too. the DNS-320 also has NO cooling, so the hard disks always get really hot - so I never leave it plugged in when I'm not using it.

So, I'm pleased.  Not worth the 5 hours invested, of course, but a satisfying intellectual challenge.

(I actually started working on it because I needed it for a data migration project.  In the midst of trying to make it work, I took a break and went and bought a 4tb Seagate USB3 drive - which is probably better anyway.  Transfers over the lan, even on Gigabyte Ethernet aren't as fast as USB.)

Next up... to see if it works with 3tb drives.  The File system is known to be incompatible with the block size on modern drives > 2GB, but the WD Red are supposed to use some sort of custom file block system so it emulates smaller/older drives... 

Yes, I'm saying there's a chance!