Sentinal DX4000 migrating data question

WD Legacy Products Sentinel Products
1

Many thanks in advance to all the moderators and people who post their issues/solutions here. We recently recovered our DX4000 after two drives crashed and it would’ve been a nightmare without the info found on this site.

A quick history of what I’ve been dealing with, just in case it should be helpful to someone else:

The server was being managed (actually…mismanaged) by an employee who left several months ago. He set up the unit new out of the box and it worked fine… until it didn’t. It was in his office and with no advice or instructions on the server left by him, nobody saw the servers drive issue a red light, or the second red light. No email alerts were setup. Suddenly no data.

Our unit had 4 2tb drives, RAID5. I ran recovery with the two remaining good drives (RAID1), made sure everything was operating smoothly, left the two remaining slots empty until I could run the driver enabler, since our two new drives were exactly identical to the prior ones, WD2002FYPS, but with a part number suffix after that number that wasn’t in the whitelist.

After going through the process of recreating the storage, running recovery, and getting the unit online with our network, we discovered that there had never been any updates installed. No WD updates or Microsoft updates! A call to the ex-employee confirmed he didn’t turn on the automatic updates, said he wanted to control when they installed, but then forgot about the need to install them. Knucklehead…

So, after the recovery was completed, we had 104 updates from microsoft download and install, then another 6, then another 14.
After the 104 updates, I installed the drive enabler via remote desktop and plugged in new drive. Migration began and high-fives prevailed. Then, the automatic updates kicked in again and the system wants to reboot to finish them, however the drive is still migrating.

My questions are: will the drive pick up where it left off if the reboot occurs, or start over? Will the reboot corrupt the new drive? Will the migration process corrupt the update if reboot occurs? Should I just let the migration finish if it will and then reboot?
After the lengthy time to reach this point, I’d hate to crash the whole thing and start from scratch again.
And last of all, is it possible that without ever getting the updates, including the important NET updates (unit was still on NET 3.2 I think), our drives that failed may be physically ok, but just had corrupted data due to network handshaking incompatibility? I’d like to plug one in to see if it will come online or be migrated to, but don’t want to take an unnecessary risk. I suppose cleaning it first is in order before trying it. We were able to recover all the data from the failed drives using external software and drive caddy, so that’s why I question if the drive is physically dead.
Thanks again.
Danbo9

2

It should not hurt to reboot. That said, why not wait :slight_smile:

I would run some kind of drive diagnostics on the drive in another pc. Then when all is settled down diskpart >clean and use it

OR use that drive in a caddy for backups

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Thanks for the info Gramps. Most of our questions were answered from reading your posts to others.

As for our server:
It finished updating, I rebooted it and my third drive started migrating yet again, after it was already migrated. We let it finish (took another 24 hrs… WHY, WD…WHY?) and made sure all the MS updates were in place. All looked fine with the drives, except it was giving a red power light and showing storage degraded. I plugged in an identical new fourth drive and it failed to initialize. Pulled it back out, rebooted, and got the dreaded “startup failed 0xD9” error. Guessing it was due to RAID 5 being installed after the third drive was inserted and it doesn’t revert back to RAID 1, but with 3 2tb drives that were showing up as ok before the reboot, shouldn’t the RAID5 still be good? Does the drive enabler need to be ran every time a new drive is installed? Was glad I hadn’t moved any data to it yet, but unhappy that I’m still relying on two external drives as my file server and backup.

We’ve went through the entire recovery drill twice from start to end, read all the posts to understand and fix the issues, however this was our second and last run at this POS box, really not willing or able to throw more time at it just to have it ■■■■ out at the last minute nor do we trust it with our data as a result. That it gets to a successful finish each time only to then fail after a routine reboot is unacceptable. I understand it’s 10 year old tech and WD would rather everyone buy their new stuff rather than support their old stuff, a typical hardware/software situation in the tech world it seems. But the recovery process is too long with no way of knowing if it will be successful until it either is or isn’t. A firmware fix (hint hint WD!) would go a long way towards fixing some of the issues and keep people invested in WD products. As for our company, we’re putting this thing up on ebay, cleaning & installing our 2 tb drives in our desktop computers for use and looking for a non-WD device for our storage needs. Something cloud compatable.

So good luck to anyone who’s struggling with the DX4000.

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The DX4000 does have a cloudberry labs add-in :slight_smile:
I blame Microsoft for dropping Small Biz soulutions

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LOL…Was it a moderator that blanked out a word in my previous post, or a bot? And really… blanking out the word that starts with a c, ends with a p, and has ra in the middle? Maybe just a little over zealous with the Big Brother routine there, WD Community message board police. :slight_smile: