Drive bay does not spin disk

WD Legacy Products Sentinel Products
1

DX4000 in recovery. Performed “Rebuild Storage” on four new WD 4TB “Red” NAS disks. Editing the whitelist made them work. Recovery with the latest ISO went flawlessly, except that it only built a three-disk RAID 5 array. Drive bay 4 reports empty bay regardless of any disk installed. I’ve tried many. After many hours of running, disks removed from slot 4 are stone cold to the touch. As though never powered up.

I’m thinking that the RAID controller is not applying power to that port. Any fix?

2

It sounds like a a hardware fault.

3

sounds like a cold spare :slight_smile:

as @ceaxer says, probably nothing you can do. Might take the lid off and wiggle and jiggle stuff.

But I am sure folks would like detailed steps how you edited which lists with what data to get the reds to recover

4

Since the ICH9R technical reference specifies the registers involved in the “sequential start” and indicates that it is possible to not start a disk, a software issue cannot be ruled out at this time.

Noteworthy is that the driver installed in the latest ISO is v10.5.6.1001. This driver version does not appear on Intel’s web site. I wonder if this is a “special case” driver made specifically for this hardware or if the driver was pulled. Later drivers break other functions in the dashboard and the drive activity LEDs.

Which brings up the point that the activity LEDs lie. Specifically, during any procedure that uses the driver loaded by the recovery media, all four LEDS always flash in unison. Once Windows has loaded and the device is operating under the 2k8R2 OS, only three are active.

As for making the “Red” disks usable:
This is a two step procedure that requires two USB flash drives. I used Sandisk Ultra 3.0 (one with a Sandisk microcontroller, the other with a Phison microcontroller). The first is used in the “Recreate storage” step. After the drive has been prepared, open a command prompt command:

ATTRIB /S /D -R *

This makes all files and directories writeable.
Open and edit WHITELISTS.xml with notepad. Copy and paste a duplicate of the last line and change the model number to include the disks you’re using, including the firmware version.

Do the same for the flash drive created in the “perform a recovery” step.

It is worth noting here that the “recreate storage” flash drive contains a file, recoverycfg.xml that is deleted after the drive is used. It is a good idea to make a copy of this file in the same directory so that you only need to create this flash drive once.

All that said, I think that my next steps will be to try to use cables from a disk outside the enclosure to the disk backplane. If success then I can call a flakey connector on the backplane.

Another option is to try to remove the CR2032 battery long enough to clear the BIOS.

5

Here’s a pleasant surprise:

Open a command prompt.
CD C:\Program Files\Windows Server\Bin\Addins\Primary
copy rst_addin.bak Intel.RST.HSBS.Config.addin

Open Server Manager => Configuration => Services
Find "Intel(R) Rapid Storage Technology Monitoring Service. Right-click - Properties and set to Automatic and OK. Then start the service.

Now open the dashboard. You’ve got a new icon!

6

Hi
Did you eventually solve this problem?
I had something similar which turned out to be a poor connection internally.

Regarding your last post - it’s a bit cryptic for my simple brain - can you be more specific ?

thanks

7

I am tempted to say, “Just do it. It’s good.” But I won’t.

No, the disk still doesn’t spin up. But if you remake that file and start that service you’ll activate the Intel RST add in for the dashboard. It will give you access to an important function, "initialize’ a volume which makes verifying a volume go much faster.

For some reason the post-installation script specifically disables that add in.

8

notice they also remove server backup from the dashboard
The design goal was to have as few knobs and dials (RST add-in)
Backup was removed because it does not work on boxes over 2 tb