My original DX4000 refused to load the OS after suffering a power outage that my UPS apparently did not save me from. After attempting to use 3 different USB drives to reinstall the OS using the iso - WD Support decided the best thing was to send me a new replacement box. I was told to put my original drives in teh same order instead of the new drives in the new box.
I did that but had the same problem with it being stuck in a loop trying to load the os and doing system initialization.
I put in the new drives to test the new box and have been able to load the OS on the new system and everything is working fine and I am able to connect to the server now.
Only problem is all my data is on my original drives in RAID 5 configuration.
I tested each drive seperately using WD diagnostics and each individual drive passed - so it is not one of the drives.
What would be your best suggestion on how to retrieve my data.
Look over this thread. Diskinternals has software that will reconstruct the raid on another box using usb connections. You could get the array mounted and copy your data
Sounds like the OS is corupt in your old array so it will not boot. Since you have the box working I suppose you could add some data to the shared folders on d: and try the recovery “keeping my data” to see if it actualy just reloads the OS and does indeed keep your data.
But with no backup, I think I would try the sysinternals. Free to try and see if it sees your data, you have to pay to actually recover the data
If the fault is only in the OS partition, you can perform a full re-install with the awkard WD4000 procedure and ISO image selecting the option to keep the original data. This way you will retain all the data in the “Document” partition and the OS will be fully reinstalled. This will take of course some time (maybe one/two days if not more depending on your RAID) but when I had issues with the OS this procedure always worked. Of course after the OS install you will have to configure everything (W2008 SE) from scratch, but the data is not deleted unless you select the option to format everything.
