I bought a Netgear SC101 on Black Friday of '05. Sounded like a pretty sweet setup to me, a NAS with 2 HDDs for 100$, can't beat that! Turns out, I was very much mistaken. At first, it seemed alright, I put a hard drive in, and installed the software. Special software to control the read/write. Sounds sketchy, but I'm sure NETGEAR/Zetera did their homework, is what I told myself. Come to find out, NETGEAR failed the course on making a good NAS. They just made a crappy one and put their name on it. The fact that it requires special software to be installed on *only* Windows PCs is a drag, instead of using some built-in SMB sharing method. The setup program was poor, and it seemed that somehow, everything was held together with duct-tape. Amazingly, it worked.
After realizing there was no point to this device, I scrapped it and put it on the shelf for a good year, before I got it back out and shoved 2 400GB Seagate 16MB 133's in. I proceeded to get it working, and backed up a bunch of my information onto it. I figured, it would be horrible for continuous use, but perhaps using it as a backup device isn't a bad idea. Wrong. A couple reformats of my computer later (trying out Windows Vista Ultimate) I'm back with Windows XP MCE (the same as before). I tried connecting the SC101 back up last night, installing the software, etc. My router gave it the normal IP addresses, everything looked as it should there, and the software even recognized that I had the two HDDs in there and that they had 1 drive partition and 0 MB free space. However, the darn thing said there were
NO DRIVES TO ATTACH!
After scouring the Internet to try and find a solution, and calling NETGEAR's worthless support number. I finally got it fixed. At first I looked on the Netgear support site and called. They said that:
~"the SC101 wasn't supported on MCE (MCE is essentially XP Pro with extra features), they said they'd have to check, hold, thanks for holding, I'm still not sure, hold, thanks, but we'll have to have someone call you back in 1-2 hours (5pm'oclock is the current time)
"~. They confirmed my phone number and it seemed promising, but it wasn't until 9:30am the
next day that I got this message while in class:
listen I think he said "Geevn a cold bach" like 10 times. Even if I did answer the call, from what I've read online, I would have gotten more help and been able to understand better a signing monkey on the phone.
These are the websites that helped me solve my problem last night:
SITES TO BE LISTED LATER
http://blog.forret.com/2006/07/netgear-sc-101-urgent-support-required/- Blog with more information like this.
http://kbserver.netgear.com/kb_web_files/n101605.asp- Get 'ut_full.exe' here (required for reparation)
What ended up fixing my unit is this:- Use Utility 1.5.6 NOT 1.5.7 I said DON'T use 1.5.7
- If you've installed 1.5.7, uninstall, reboot, install 1.5.6.
- Make sure the password for the device is the DEFAULT PASSWORD 'password'.
- Yes, the default password is 'password'.
- Make this the administrator password for both drives (yes each drive is unique) and for all the partitions 'password'.
- If you only have one of whatever, just ignore the 's' and set the default password for however many drives/partitions you do have.
You will need to run two commands with the 'ut_full.exe' for each partition to attach after running 'ut_full.exe listall'. Get the ROOT_IP and PART_IP from the set of information in this picture (The section to the top is what the ROOT information will always look like, just 3 lines. The section to the bottom will contain at least 2 lines, more if you have more than one partition.), make sure it matches up correctly for the partition you are trying to repair:- 'ut_full.exe ROOT_IP PART_IP getpart password'
- Note the number set in the middle either 01 00 01 or 02 00 02
- 02 00 02 - For a MIRRORED DRIVE
- 01 00 01 - For a NON-MIRRORED DRIVE
- If your values match neither of these, use the values that it should have for the next step.
- Note also the number at the end (THE LAST SET) 01, 02, ..., 18, 1C, ...
- 'ut_full.exe newattr ROOT_IP PART_IP password'
- Type in:
- 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0X 00 0X 00 00 00 0A XX
- Yes, use the numbers from the 1st step to fill in the X's.
- Essentially all you are doing, is hopefully just changing the value before the last to '0A'.
- Try resetting the device by holding down the reset button on the back for more that 10sec.
- Try uninstalling the software/reinstalling.
- Try attaching.
It took me several tries and a few different techniques to get my drives working, but they are A-OK, now. I fully attribute their working order to the steps above, so if you are having trouble with yours, try it out, and let me know if it helps.
If the 'ut_full.exe' commands are not working, make sure you followed the directions. If it just won't work, period... Then you may have a problem that is only fixable by tossing the thing in the rubbish. I apologize if this wasn't what you wanted to hear.
What is my final opinion of this product?
Do NOT buy the SC 101 from Netgear. You can find much better and more viable alternatives elsewhere.
Final opinion of this for Google is:
DO NOT BUY THE Netgear SC 101 SC101
do not buy the netgear sc101 sc 101
horrible un-reliable lose data non-working broken bad stay away
