Can’t Login to Synology DSM – “System is getting ready. Please log in later.”

Synology DS212

So I’m hoping this will help someone who encounters the same problem I did when I tried to login to my Synology DS212 tonight.  At first, I thought it was simply waking up from being asleep,but I kept checking every couple minutes and after like 15 minutes, when I kept getting:

System is getting ready. Please log in later.

I knew something was wrong.  So I did some searching on Google and of course, I wasn’t the only one having problems.  On Synology’s forum, I found a bunch of people having the same problem going back to March.  Skimming through the reports, it seems due to upgrading the version of DSM.  However, there were “official” reports from Synology saying it was due to the Synology box being compromised (aka hacked).  I don’t know if I completely believe this.  But rather than point fingers and play the blame game, let’s get to the solution (or solutions).  If you look at this post, you’ll see Synology suggests 3 possible solutions:

  1. Remove disks and use a spare disk to re-install DSM
  2. Manually install DSM
  3. Remove disks and boot (then contact Synology)

So I will jump to the answer and recommend going with Option 1.  That worked for me.  It was fairly pain-less to remove the hard-drives, insert a spare drive, turn it on, and use the Synology Assistant to find the box on my network and upgrade to the latest version of DSM.  Then I took out the spare hard-drive and put back my original hard-drives.  I then had to wait for it boot up again and use the Synology Assistant to install the latest version of DSM to be able to login to DSM via my web browser again (yes, I spent probably a hour or so to get back to the same functionality I had months ago – this is called technology).  Anyways, the other options didn’t seem so great and no one else seemed to have any success, so I would recommend going with Option 1 like I did.  And then hopefully you’ll have a working NAS again and you can continue backing up your cat videos.