So shame on me for not noting that pulling drives and replacing them might kill a NAS. I pulled two of three WD Red NAS 3TB drives from a machine without removing the original partitions or removing them from RAID 5. So the RAID 5 volume still showed on the drives.
I left them in the NAS after startup for hours while running an errand thinking it would eventually boot normally as after 10-15 minutes nothing was coming up on the mobile or desktop NAS Navigator 2 or mobile app.
Doing some digging I found the issue with the red light blinking 7 times. I have followed all of those steps including trying to TFTP boot and several items related to EM and flashing from the LSUpdater. It never finds the NAS. I also can not see the device ever making a DHCP request either or getting an IP.
On occasions I can ping the device on 192.168.11.150 when it's in EM or whatever mode. I have gotten it to pickup boot images from
https://www.aaronhastings.me/completely-recovering-from-a-bricked-buffalo-linkstation-ls200-series-nas-and-opening-the-firmware-too/ as it was my understanding that these were similar enough models, just one came with drives.
I have remove the Intel RAID 5 array from all three drives and also cleaned them in diskpart. No partitions exist on any of the drives.
However I still have the following issue. With or without a drive the NAS will power on and the top light will blink steadily white for a while before going to the only the bottom light blinking 7 times in red repeatedly.
If I quickly press the function button on the front while the red light is blinking 7 times the top light goes back to rapidly flashing white. It is during this time I have had some success with pinging or getting TFTP to at least load something Though again, conflicting posts about if this device supports TFTP or not even. So after the pushing of the function button it goes back to the quick flashing white top light only. No light ever goes solid and the top light will flash for well beyond 10 minutes with no other activity.
During this time the LAN light will also flash like it has activity. However, again no activity follows like the lights going solid.
One other interesting thing I notice. If you turn the switch on the back off, which should turn the device off. The top light continues to blink white and LAN activity also continues.
Anybody go any other ideas for trying to get this back to working? The original drives that were in the NAS were reformatted before I realized there was an issue or they were otherwise needed. The device is years old and has worked perfectly until I tried going from 2TB drives to 3TB drives.