Hi,
We received a WD Sentinel DX4000 NAS storage with 4 x 2 TB that the customer forgot to switch off before a planned power outage, and which now refuses to start.
A priori, the NAS enclosure itself is working.
The four drives initialize and a small blue diode appears in front of each drive when it is ready.
The small display panel of the NAS displays:
Code:
Initializing OK
Searching ...
and then
Code:
STARTUP
FAILED: 0xD9
We checked the S.M.A.R.T. values of each drive. They were ok, excepted for drive #3, which had a few bad sectors.
We cloned it to a healthy drive of the same model (WD RE4-GP WD2002FYPS).
The cloning revealed that the amount of bad sectors was about 67 Kb.
We swapped drive #3 with its clone, but this did not suffice to restore the system.
We also tried starting the system without the drive #3.
According to the Administrator's Guide,
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/UM/ENG/4779-705064.pdf, the system supports RAID 1 and RAID 5. The customer doesn't remember which kind of RAID was used, nor the total storage capacity.
The partitioning sheme of drives #1 as well as drive #2 is as follows:
Code:
100 Mb (EFI system partition)
60.00 Gb RAW
5528.78 RAW
When drives #4 is attached to another computer, whilst drive #3 is, it is not "In line" but "Off line" in the disk manager.
But when attached alone, it is becomes "In line". So, there is some conflict between the two drives, as they were same.
Drive #3 as well as drive #4 have a unique RAW partition which covers all the drive.
The computer technician who usually cares for this company believes that the system was in RAID 1.
The identical partititioning shemes of drives #1 and #2 could suggest this.
However, the manual suggests that the maximal RAID 1 storage capacity for this system is 2 TB, and this is also in contractiction which the size of the third partition (5528.78 GB), which suggests that at least three drives are used.
So, my assumption is that there might be some RAID 1 by default for the system partition, on which Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials should be installe, as there is such license sticker at the back pane of the NAS, and then from within Windows, the description of some logical drive, spanning over the remaining space of all drives, or alternatively RAID 5.
However, what I find strange if the system partition was in RAID 1 is that no file system is detected.
As this NAS is running Windows, I expected the system partition being NTFS or so.
There is some reset button at the backpane of the NAS, but I don't want to play with this, unless all drives were cloned first.
The manual suggests that the user can unlock the storage using a password.
I hope that there is no encryption, BitLocker or else.
The goals are :
1) Recovering the data
2) Restoring/reinstalling the system, if possible with the data, otherwise without the data, but after their recovery.
Does anyone here had some experience with the WD Sentinel series ?
Should I assume a RAID 5 system and try reassembling the third partition of drives #1 and #2 with the unique partition of drives #3 and #4 ?
Thank you.