I spent way too much time today trying to get my old LinkStation LS-WX2.0TL/R1 to boot with two new drives. But now it's working, so thanks to OP and everyone else who chipped in. Some details that may help with certain steps of the process:
1. Wiping disks: If wiping drives from Windows, note that if there is an EFI partition, it will likely be protected. In that case you may use diskpart, a command-line tool. Get a command prompt (run as administrator), then type 'diskpart'. Once in diskpart, do 'list disks', then 'select Disk 1' (or whatever your disk is to wipe), then 'clean' (no quotes for any of those commands). Choose the correct disk!!
2. Extracting firmware: From the firmware update directory, I had to rename initrd.img and uImage.img to initrd.zip and uImage.zip, respectively. Then I chose to Extract all... and dumped the contents into the same directory as the originals (the directory where you will serve your files via TFTP). When done, I had to rename those .zip files back with .img extensions, otherwise the updater program would complain. You may need to change your Windows setting to "view extensions" to do this renaming. Another note: there were two uImage-xxx.buffalo files; I choose to extract and rename the one that more closely resembled my model name, and the NAS seems to be operating correctly now, but just to note, after flashing the firmware, the default unit name was given as LS-WXLA43.
3. To enable the NAS to talk to the TFTP server, I had to:
* disable firewall
* Set my IP to 192.168.11.1/24
* reboot the NAS using this sequence:
- reboot holding function button
- when blue function light flashes, release function button, then press it again
- wait for device to go into E06 error (red LED blinks six times)
- press function button again -- had to hold it down for a few seconds.
4. Watch your TFTP server logs to see if the files start transferring. Once they've transferred, you may have to wait a few minutes for the NAS to show up in NAS Navigator. It should appear in Emergency mode. You can shut down your TFTP server when you get to this point.
5. NAS Navigator then asked me if I wanted to correct an auto-assigned IP address on the NAS. At first I said yes, and tried to assign it an address in the 192.168.11.0/24 range, but that led to major problems in the next phase--I'll leave out the gory details. So the next time thru, I left the auto-assigned address alone and changed my PC's IP and netmask to match--this was in the 169.254.0.0/16 range. Sometimes NAS Navigator asks for an admin password—this is "password" (no quotes).
6. When running LSUpdater, be sure to click the ICON at top left corner, NOT the drop-down menu. I didn't even realize that icon was holding a menu the first time I went through this! Then select "Debug..." It wasn't clear if any of these options were to be changed or not, but I left them alone. If you get a message about "partition not found", you will need to check the box to "partition tables". When the process is complete, the device should update and reboot (possibly more than once) on its own. Wait for the entire process to complete—it takes quite a while. Watch the LEDs for possible clues as to where the NAS in the process. You might need to manually reboot it at some point...
7. When everything came back up again, I found to my great amusement (*cough*) that the web interface was in Japanese. You'll need to log in with admin/password, then choose the 4th item in the dark grey bar ("System" in Japanese), then the third red bar down ("Language" in Japanese), then click the button in that panel. It will let you change to "English", but you should also choose "CP437" as Windows Client Language.
I repeated the whole process with a second set of disks just to make sure I didn't screw any of my notes up majorly. Your mileage may vary. Good times!