LS441DE endless booting

[darthgriffin]

I added a 4th HDD to my LinkStation days ago, and it's still unavailable with a blinking, white power LED. How long should it take to boot? Can I force it to reboot without harm to my data?

[1000001101000]

what do you mean when you say you added a 4th drive?
did you add a blank drive while it was running and then format it,etc and now it's not coming up after a reboot? Or did you turn it off, add a new drive and now it's not booting with the new drive in place?
was this drive replacing a failed drive?
what bay is the new drive in?

[darthgriffin]

Okay, detail time. I had 3 4TB drives running in a RAID 5. Once the data was transferred to it from the 4TB drive in my PC, and I'd been using it for a week to make sure Kodi and everything was working properly with the NAS, I powered down the LS, installed the 4th HDD from my PC to bay 4 and powered the LS back up. That was 4 days ago and the power LED on my LS is still flashing white. All 4 HDD lights are solid green.

[Texturtle]

It's likely attempting to read the partition and boot from that new drive. If you turn it off and remove that 4th drive does it boot? If so, then I'd suggest wiping that drive completely by following the steps outlined here: https://www.buffalotech.com/knowledge-base/cleaning-a-disk-in-windows-7-using-diskpart

I know it says Windows 7, but the procedure works fine in any version newer than 7 as well.

[darthgriffin]

I had to pull the power cord on the LS to power it off, but I put the HDD in an USB enclosure and was able to get it back to a ready state via Windows Disk Management. It thought it was still part of an old dynamic volume. It's back in the LS and formatting now so I think I'm good from here. Thanks for the help.