I just got a DX4000 minus its drives and set about to recreating the storage and recovering the operating system. However, as I found out (and as many have found out) it’s not so easy, because WD has imposed a “whitelist” of approved drives to use with this server. And you get all these errors “0xd9”, “bad storage”, “invalid number of drives” because the DX4000 is rejecting your drives!
I got a pair of WD4002FYYZ (specifically, “WD4002FYYZ-01B7CB1”) and of course I got all these errors, and more.
Following Gramps’ advice, I loaded up the recovery.log file that had been generated on the USB stick, and to my surprise I found these entries:
2019.02.03 04:06:09 - INFO - RaidCfg64 detected 2 drives
2019.02.03 04:06:09 - INFO - RaidCfg64 drive K7JY***L: port=2
2019.02.03 04:06:09 - INFO - RaidCfg64 drive K7JZ***L: port=3
2019.02.03 04:06:09 - WARN - Drive 0 serial K7JY***L model WDC WD4002FYYZ-01B7CB1 does not match any in white list
2019.02.03 04:06:09 - WARN - Powering drive 2488616 off
2019.02.03 04:06:09 - WARN - Drive 1 serial K7JZ***L model WDC WD4002FYYZ-01B7CB1 does not match any in white list
2019.02.03 04:06:09 - WARN - Powering drive 2488616 off
2019.02.03 04:06:09 - INFO - Detected drive 0 serial=K7JY***L model=WDC WD4002FYYZ-01B7CB1 SATA=2 led=0
2019.02.03 04:06:09 - INFO - Security: SUPPORTED
2019.02.03 04:06:09 - INFO - Enabled: 0
2019.02.03 04:06:09 - INFO - Locked: 0
2019.02.03 04:06:09 - INFO - Frozen: 0
So then I thought, “what whitelist??” HERE is the whitelist, according to recovery.log:
2019.02.03 04:06:01 - DEBUG - Reading resource file 'C:\wdrecovery\Locale\en_US.xml'
2019.02.03 04:06:02 - DEBUG - Parsing whitelist 'C:\wdrecovery\whitelist.xml'
Note that this C:\ directory structure is the root of the USB key that you have to create to perform “recreate” and “recovery”.
So now it is a simple matter to add my brand-new RE drives to this whitelist, and work flawlessly this time!
I made the “recreate” USB key again, this time I went to the WDRECOVERY directory and sure enough found these files:
WHITELISTK.XML
WHITELISTS.XML
Opened up each of these in Notepad, and here’s the relevant section:
<WhiteList>
<!-- Draco/Draco_RE -->
<Model description="Enterprise Storage 2 TB" size="1907730" etype="constant">WDC WD2002FYPS-02W3B0</Model>
<Model description="Enterprise Storage 2 TB" size="1907730" etype="constant">WDC WD2002FYPS-02W3B1</Model>
<Model description="Enterprise Storage 2 TB" size="1907730" etype="constant">WDC WD2009FYPX-09AAMB0</Model>
<Model description="Enterprise Storage 3 TB" size="2861589" etype="constant">WDC WD3009FYPX-09AAMB0</Model>
To which I added this very line, to both files:
<Model description="Enterprise Storage 4 TB" size="3815448" etype="constant">WDC WD4002FYYZ-01B7CB1</Model>
I had to go “file-properties” first and change the two XML files from “read only”, so that I was able to save back to the USB key. Then after the update, I changed back to “read only”, just in case the software checks that status as yet another ERROR condition.
But anyway, it "recreated’ my drives. Wow, success! Then I did the “recovery” procedure, edited the USB key again in the same way (because of course it checks another time), and it worked that time too!
So seems like you just have to do some undocumented editing and you can probably get any set of drives you want to work on the DX4000.
And I also saw this other post that describes all the same procedure from 2015, because of course somebody else figured it out:
