I’ve given up on my WD EX4100. It’s extremely slow, it has corrupted uncountable files over iSCSI, and it has a massive number of in-the-wild exploitable vulnerabilities. I’ve put all the disks I had in it into my full-blown server, and now the EX4100 is just gathering dust.
However, the other day I ran into a tutorial that show how to install Ubuntu on an earlier model (EX4000, perhaps). And it was dead simple – you make a bootable USB stick with the Ubuntu installer CD on it, plug it into the NAS, plug in a USB keyboard, and start the NAS up while holding the reset button. Once it says “Boot failed” or something similar, you’re in the installer, and can go to town. The only complication is, you have to do it blind – since there’s no video output on the EX4100, you can’t see what’s happening. But if you install the same thing into a virtual machine, you can see screen by screen what keys to press, and you just press the same ones on the keyboard attached to the NAS.
So I was incredibly excited about the possibility of actually getting something for my money, and tried to do this. Unfortunately, the EX4100 seems to have been changed in a couple critical ways – it says “Unrecognized USB device” when you plug in the keyboard, and it won’t actually boot from the USB stick… the reset trick only leads to a reboot.
So I’d really like to implore you guys to lend me a hand. What do I have to do to install Linux (of any variety) on the EX4100 from a USB stick? All I need to do is get the damned box to boot from the stick, and the installer will handle the rest (including the keyboard issue). But I just can’t figure out how. In addition to holding the reset button while powering on, I’ve tried also holding both the “UP” and “DOWN” buttons at the same time, but no dice. And I’ve tried with all 3 USB ports.
I’ll open this thing up if I need to, as it’s otherwise trash to me. Any help will be greatly appreciated!
