I found an old Western Digital NAS in a box and decided to clean it up, test it and sell it. I had a few small WD drives to install in it and couldn’t get them to work and the NAS to initialize.
First, the NAS requires WD drives! This isn’t a fact that was widely available and took me a while to figure out. Second, I couldn’t get the drives to initialize, but thanks to someone else online (I’ll credit him if/when I can find the page again) there is a fix for it.
1, Go here: http://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?DL and download and install the WD Data Lifeguard software on your computer.
Right-click and “run diagnostics”
2, Connect your WD drive as a slave/external/USB to your computer.
3, Start WD DLG, select your secondary drive, RIGHT-click on it, then select Run Diagnostics
Make very sure that you’re not wiping your primary drive here!
4, Select Write Zeros and click Start.
This will write zeros over the entire drive and possibly take a couple of hours depending on the size of the drive.
Write zeros
Repeat this for all the drives you will install in the NAS, and then install them. Now when you start the NAS it will initialize the drives, load the operating system and boot up normally. When it’s all done, you’ll have all the drive LEDs be solid green.
At this point you can point your browser to the IP of the NAS and then use admin/admin for the login and password (assuming it’s the default) to configure the device.