1TB WD World Edition (white light) bricked after firmware upgrade

WD Legacy Products Other Network Drives
1

My 1Tb WD World Edition has been working fine since September 2010.

It has been permanently connected to my home network, and besides placing a load of data on there after first purchasing the drive, I’ve had very little cause to use it (mainly because I was crushed by how slow it is).

Used it successfully today, and after getting frustrated with transfer speeds, decided to upgrade the firmware via the web GUI to see if that’d help.

Afraid I can’t tell the new version number, because the drive is now bricked.

Here are the steps I followed after successfully upgrading the firmware (the drive definitely still worked after the upgrade).

  • I attempted to add a new user via the webGUI which failed. Immediately prior to the upgrade I had done this sucecssfully.

  • Thinking maybe the drive needed to be reset, I rebooted it via the power switch on the back.

When powering the drive back on, only one of the strip of LEDs lit. It lit immediately, did not blink and stayed solidly lit.

At that point I was unable to connect to the drive by any means, or ping it’s IP.

WD Discover does not find the drive any longer on my network, although the connection to the router looks fine, and is unchanged.

I can’t believe a simple firmware upgrade has killed the drive, but that seems to be the case as I’m unable to communicate with it any longer by any method.

Please help, I have a LOT of critical data on this drive.

  1. What is the significance of only the lower LED of the strip being lit up?

  2. Is it the drive itself which is fried, or the cutdown Linux OS which is failing to boot since the upgrade?

  3. How can I get to the data on the drive to copy it off there?

Thanks.

RI

2

The drive inside the case is formatted as EXT3, I was looking for info on the light and this is what I found:

Bottom LED Dimmed Powering up
LEDs light up in sequence from bottom to top Transitioning to drive ready
Normal Operation
Capacity Gauge, steady illumination Power-on state, ready for use
Moving up and down Drive in use
Slow flashing (every four seconds) System standby
Power Down Sequence
Dimming up/dimming down in an odd/even alternating pattern Drive powering down
Device Events
Bottom LED dimmed, top LED flashing Boot unsuccessful
Fast flashing (every half second) My Book system event, action required
Continuous “center out” sweep pattern Unit failure
3

If the HDisk is not the root of problem see my experience of getting data off mine when NAS board fried. It was on its way out (slow, kept disappearing from network etc) so I thought a firmware update might help. Died completely after that !

http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book-World-Edition/recover-data-from-mbwe/td-p/148346