Remove external USB drives to boot Sentinel DX4000

Hello!

Question, I have an external USB drive attached to my Sentinel.  And when I reboot the Sentinel, it just hangs at loading OS, forever.  I have found if I unplug the USB drives it comes up just fine.  Is it trying to boot from the USB drives?  Is there a way I can correct this?

Thanks.

Since it is headless, there is no way to get into BIOS to change the settings.  Have no clue if it was fixed in a Firmware upgrade, but you should go to the monitor tab anyway and make sure you have the latest and greatest.

Also it is best to do all the windows updates on the server before joining clients as the clients will end up being updated also.  If you have already joined them no worries, they should update themselves.

This is terrible. I travel and my DX4000 is set to back up to a USB drive every day. Last week while out of the country a Micro$oft update was automatically applied and the Sentinel just hung until I got home and unpluged the USB drive. If I could access the BIOS I could fix this in a matter of seconds. Is there no way to get into the BIOS?

In this case I needed to get access to the Sentinel to grab a file and it was not online and available. This **bleep**.

Do you have the latest firmware?  I have a 2tb MY Book connected and am using WIndows Server Backup.  Mine will reboot no problems with it attached.  There is no way to get ionto BIOS

Yes, I do have the latest firmware and all other updates. The USB drive is for a backup to run. But anything that causes the NAS to reboot while the drive is attached cause the reboot to stall and not complete. Very worthless. I can’t use Windows Server backup because my NAS is over 2TB and it will not work. Micro$oft forces you to buy expensive server backup software if the storage exceeds 2TB.

You have to realize that the “specs” for server2008R2 were probably done in 2007 and 2tb was a safe bet 7 years ago.

The new DS versions are built on server 2012R2 and will do larger than 2tb no problems.

I have usb drives attached to mine and it reboots.  But I know usb drives can be seen diferentlt somehow

jimmyfwalker wrote:

Hello!

 

Question, I have an external USB drive attached to my Sentinel.  And when I reboot the Sentinel, it just hangs at loading OS, forever.  I have found if I unplug the USB drives it comes up just fine.  Is it trying to boot from the USB drives?  Is there a way I can correct this?

 

Thanks.

The drive is bootable, you need to clean the bootsector from it.

Make sure there is nothing you want to save on the usb drive and then open an administrative cmd prompt, type diskpart → list disk → select disk # (replace # with the correct disk number) → clean → create par pri → format quick → assign → exit → exit.  Browse to my computer and you should see the new clean drive, reboot the dx4000 and it should boot fine.

I did try the procedures you had listed below, but my external USB drive is 4TB, so it would only format it to 2GBs.

I am sure there are some diskpart commands to do this, but it may be simpler to do diskpart again, select the proper disc, and clean and exit. then open diskmgmt.msc on your computer and it should show a new drive and ask you about mbr and gpt.  Select GPT and go from there in the gui, new simple, format etc.

jimmyfwalker wrote:

I did try the procedures you had listed below, but my external USB drive is 4TB, so it would only format it to 2GBs.

diskpart → list disk → select disk # (replace # with the correct disk number) → clean → convert gpt → create par pri → format quick → assign → exit → exit.

1 Like

ISU-Skyman you are a lifesaver and this worked absolutely perfectly, thank you so much.

I travel and while traveling I need to log into my Sentinal to get files. If a Micro$oft update has caused the NAS to reboot I was out of luck. This has happened to me more than once and is extremely aggrivating.

Now it is working perfectly, Thanks to you. Most excellent!!