Chris Hansen’s blog

Oh well. The weather was atrocious, so we stayed in. This is bad (and we’re doing it again TODAY, just to be cussed!)

The major suckitude came when our friend Bobby arrived from Hong Kong bearing two 1TB drives for my NAS box. The price was right and they seem to be working OK at the moment. Unfortunately, D-Link is really pretty bad when it comes to the software running its hardware.

I removed the previous drives (two 500GB drives) and installed the new ones—really great that they just slide in and lock themselves. Then I fired it up, and tried to log into the web page that starts them off by formatting the new drives.

Could I remember my password? Could I hell! I tried all the ones I usually try, and none of them worked. I swore like a trooper and HWMBO, who had just come back from The Well with dinner, ran away, the air was so blue.

I looked online, and a procedure for resetting the machine (a D-Link DNS-323, to be precise) was there, but a “reset button” was mentioned, without giving its precise position. The D-Link manual didn’t have any reference to a reset button, so I was stumped.

Finally someone in a forum somewhere mentioned that you needed an unbent paperclip. Aha! I needed to look for holes in the box! There was one, on the back plate, well hidden. I had to remove one drive, keep the power on, and press the paperclip into that hole for 10 seconds. That initialises the firmware so that it sees you as a new user. THEN, and only then, could I get into the web page and start formatting the drive.

Wotta pain!

I had to apologise to HWMBO, and we both promised each other that we would go to bed early because we were about to go onto British Summer Time, three weeks behind our US friends. We went to bed at midnight, as usual, and I am feeling it this morning.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 29th, 2009 at 02:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.