4TB drive has power, but no lights and not visible on home network

My 4TB My Cloud drive is a few years old and has sat dormant and unconnected for sometime. I recently powered it up and was working fine for a couple of weeks.

However a few days ago, I was getting power (in that I can hear the drive going round) but no lights in the front or rear near the LAN cable and it’s no longer visible on my home network.

Does anyone have any ideas why this has suddenly happened and how I can resolve it in order to retrieve precious photos and video?

I appreciate these devices don’t last forever but to suddenly not work makes me very nervous in trusting physical hardware going forward over online storage.

Thank you in advance.

Assuming this is a single bay My Cloud and not a My Cloud Home. As a troubleshooting step, try performing a 40 second reset.

How to Reset a My Cloud (single bay) Device

Try to access the My Cloud Dashboard.

Sometimes the front LED dies or the blue color dies, does the front LED show any other colors when power is applied to the My Cloud. Does the back LEDs of the network port on the My Cloud light up?

Other troubleshooting steps. Try a different Ethernet cable to connect the My Cloud to the network router. Try a different networking port on the router. If you have a computer with an Ethernet port, connect the My Cloud directly to the Computer using the Ethernet cable. Put a network switch, if one has one available, in between the router and the My Cloud.

Hard drives can and do fail, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise if one has had the My Cloud for a number of years that the hard drive within it might fail. If all other troubleshooting steps fail to resolve the issue one could extract (or “shuck”) the My Cloud hard drive from it’s enclosure and, using a USB to SATA adapter (or similar method), connect it to a computer running Linux or that uses a Linux driver and attempt to read the contents of the My Cloud drive. If the drive is readable then one can copy the user data off the drive to another location. There are a number of videos on Youtube that show how to shuck/extract the single bay My Cloud hard drive.

try to replace a power supply. In my recent troubleshooting I thought that external HD has insuficient power, so replaced original 1.5A power supply with “2A” powersuply from Aliexpres for $2 - My cloud didn’t even boot, even if lights were on. Even after 10 minutes didn’t respond to ping, so returned back original power supply and all returned back to normal. Wondering what they meant by “2A” but that definitely was not a current rating :slight_smile:

try this: https://www.howtogeek.com/112888/3-ways-to-access-your-linux-partitions-from-windows/

2A general means 2 amps. Often devices need a specific input to operate properly. Using the wrong power supply input can cause problems like; the unit not powering on, not operating properly. Or in rare cases if too much power is supplied, damage to the unit.

FYI, one of the links (My Cloud dead, how to see content on Windows 10?) I posted above does detail a discussion on several methods to access the contents of the My Cloud hard drive that has been attached to a Windows computer. Including using a Linux boot disk and Paragon’s Linux File System driver for Windows. The main advantage to using Linux boot disk/boot USB flash drive/Linux VM or Paragon’s software is one can write to the extracted hard drive. Some (possibly all if I remember right the last time I looked a them) of the programs in that HowTooGeek.com link are read only.

By using Linux one can also restore the single bay My Cloud firmware to the hard drive (existing My Cloud drive or a brand new hard drive). There are a number of methods detailed in this My Cloud subforum to “unbrick” a My Cloud hard drive back to working order (assuming the hard drive isn’t damaged or failed) some of those methods recommend using LInux.

Just wanted to point to the fact that small power adapters are not eternal, I saw it already several times that after years of continuous operation it simply ceased providing rated ampers and device was not working properly. Replacing by new one with same rating brought device back.