Upgrading Buffalo Linkstation Mini NAS (LS-WGL)

Upgrading Disks of Buffalo Linkstation Mini NAS (LS-WGL)

I have two Buffalo mini Linkstations. I love them. They are quiet, use very little power thanks to the 2.5 inch disks, and the RAID 1 makes me less worried about  loosing my data. One of the two linkstations, a LS-WGL came with two 250 GB disks and I figured it was a good time to upgrade to two 1 TB disks, now that they are that cheap (+- 40 USD each).

Due to the old age of the NAS, documentation seem out to data and most links rotten. This is a merge of instructions from various sources. Mainly from:

The steps for me involved:

  1. Open the linkstation according to http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Category:LS-WSGL/R1 and replace hard drives.
  2. Directly connect the linkstation to a computer via ethernet cable. The linkstation will assign itself an IP of 192.168.11.150. You therefore need to assign a fixed IP address to our computer in the same subnet (e.g. 192.168.11.1). When we start up the NAS with the new disks, it will not boot, but rather flash a red LED.
  3. Push the emergency boot image to the NAS through TFTP by running the TFTP Boot.exe. I was actually able to run this from wine and didn’t even need windows. Watch out. There are various versions of the TFTP Boot.exe for different models. For the LS-WGL, we need this one. If the link breaks, googling “TFTP_Boot_Recovery_LS-WSGL_1.05.exe” might get you somewhere. With the “TFTP Boot.exe” running, we push the function button on the NAS. The TFTP boot application will display something like
Client 192.168.11.150 ... Blocks Served
Client 192.168.11.150 ... Blocks Served
  1. We don’t want to see a timeout here. If we do, we might either have the wrong boot recovery or set our IP address wrong. The NAS now will be in Emergency mode. Note: the IP address in emergency mode changed and now should be 169.254.59.100. (You can verify this in the NAS Navigator2).
  2. Finally, flash the firmware. But we first need to change our computer’s IP address to match the subnet the NAS now is in, e.g. to 169.254.59.2. Then, we run the LSupdater.exe of the lswsgl-106 archive obtained from buffalotech. It will tell us that the drives are not formatted and suggests to format them, which is what we want.