I am a new user of the WD Sentinel DX4000 NAS started work with an Online Media Content Provider/Management company a little over three months ago as the IT Operations co-ordinator.Given that my predecessor left rather abruptly and without warning ,I found my self in the new Job without the benefit of a hand over documentation order than a lengthy conversation I managed to have with him on the weekend of my resumption where I managed to grab as much information i coould think to ask on the IT/Network infrastructure as well as the policy(s) in place.
My present challlenge is that some eight hours ago, the WD Sentinel DX4000 NAS (8Terabytes )apparently just stopped working.
Efforts to reboot the sysytem and what happens follows this particular sequence:
Push Power botton:System starts sounds consistent with a system or small server starting up and shows STARTUP INITIALIZING on the small monitoring screen.
All four led’s indicating the four hard disk and that of the power botten glow blue intermitently for about 30 - 40 seconds
“INITIALIZING OK SEARCHING” shows afterwards on the screen for just over a minuteafter which the message changes to;
STARTUP FAILED:0XD9
I have tried repeatedly to reboot the system but i have not achived any progress …The danger for me is that i can not afford to loose any/all of the working data/content the firm has gathered created and stored over a period of of two and a half years .failure to recover(?) the content i might as well drop a resignation letter at work.
I have nightmares thinking of what i would do if such a thing happned and have been working to mitigate it ,i just wasnt quick enough.When you say the box is broke, short of buying a new box how do i restore /retrive my data/content.
How old is the box? I am hoping it is under warranty.
Call WD.
If the box is broke, not 2 drives died at the same time, you have no choice that I know of, other than a new box.
This was how it was explained to me at the beginning. Box dies, get a replacement box and swap the drives. No one has been there in the real world. Ain’t it great to be on the cutting edge?
Sorry for being unavailable for a while for some reason i couldn’t log in to the community using my New User identity after repeated attempts at password recovery failed i created the New_User2 identity.
Thank you for your suggestions gramps ,i have registered the device as well as another online and it turns out we (the firm) still have limited warranty cover for the faulty devices.
Is it possible that opening/ejecting one or more of the hard disks while the the machine was in operation is responsible for the problem? My predecessors says that an intern once did this and the message that came up afterward for the disk(s) concerned was storage degraded but when the hard disk(s) were reinserted and restarted the system took a long time to verify but eventually it was done and returned to normal functionality.
I recall that one of the selling points of the Sentinel unit is that it is supposed to have a hot swap capability for the hard disks but is it possible that this might be the cause of my problem.
I have to say that getting access to and ensuring the survival of the data in the hard disks is of utmost concern to me to that end I took out the 3 Terabyte Hard Disks(there are 4) and attached them to a system on start up,I was prompted for the hard disk password which I believe is an indication that the hard disks and the data contained therein are still intact.I have to say though that password that I keyed in which happens to be the administrator password was invalid .Is there a different lock on the hard disks apart from the administrator password or the different partition users passwords? If there is, how do i unlock the hard disks without loosing my data?
Please I need suggestions on how I can back up/copy out the data in those hard disks before I begin the recovery process that Western Digital suggested.
Please note that although the network interface cards still blink indicating some form of activity every attempt to communicate with the device has failed.
Currently I am studying the documentation on recovery and downloading server recovery ISO. Gramps I recall seeing a thread where some guy said he had been undertaking the recovery process for about 23 hours with no indication of change or success never got to post an update as to how the whole process ended i am about to begin the same process I hope it would end well in my case.Do you have any suggestions.Thank you richUK for the site you posted.
If the drive that was removed and put back had finished the rebuild it should not be an issue. But if another drive was removed or died while it was rebuilding, then that could be very bad.
I personally have zero experience withe the next 2 items.
FIrst putting the drives in a diff box. (Non WD) in theory if you had the same controller it should work. Obvioulsy placing the drives in another WD box would/should work.
Password: There is a “tool” in the recovery ISO to remove/reset a drive password. You may apply a password in the dashboard to the discs so if someone stole them they could not put them in another box to read them
My appreciation to those whotook the time to look into my challenge and make suggestions.
I started twodays ago the recovery process suggested by WD support, downloaded the 8Gig thereabouts ISO file and mounted it per their suggestion then began the recovery process currently at this time (about 10:50pm west african time UTC+1) it is still at 79.75% repair stage and i am really hopping that this ends before morning be cause failling that a collegue going to london will be picking up the unit so as to return same per the RMA.
Two really pressing questions i have right now are:
Given that i have some six(6) hours before the abort action and ship back to WD is there anybody whocan tell me how to speed this process up or do i just wait.
While the system is at “Repairing… xx.xx%”, i have tried to acccess the unit per the directions given by the system recovery process guide and while i do see the folders of the different users/usergroups , i can not access them repeated attempts give me this responce:
Widows cannot access \xx.xx.xx.xx------ .
You do not have permission to access \xx.xx.xx.xx------. Contact your network administrator to request access.
I note though that the above appears to be the case with folders that had authentication lock on them .The question is when the repair process concludes are there going to be anymore processes to run through and whatever the answer would i be able to access the content of the folders after repair?
I know in and aroung my time zone most people are asleep but i would really appreciate helpfull answers from whoever else is still awake&online.
Yeah that idea occurred to me but like I said when I enter the start menu and run \xx.xx.xx.xx I immediately have access to view all folders on the drive (s) however I am unable to access anyone of them I do not get any prompts for username , password. Is this because the repair process is not done yet?
It just reached REPAIRING … 90.2% My major worry in this is whether the data contained within the system before its failure will still be there when the Repair" process is over.That is and has always been my overriding concern the process is complete and I can’t get the data or the data is lost as a result of the recovery process (even though the recovery guide specifically gave the option of restoring without loosing data) I will be sending the unit and the hard disks contained within them to the UK for data recovery.
