Can't Connect to the Device

[Bennor]

There is obviously some sort of network communication issue going on between your devices. Here would be my suggestion. I’d reset the WD My Cloud and start from scratch.

• Perform a reset of the WD My Cloud via the steps at this link.
• Disable any software firewall applications on the PC.
• Turn off all network devices. Including smartTV’s, the gateway/router, and if possible any wifi devices like printers, tablets and smartphones.
• Connect one PC directly via Ethernet wire to the same router that the WD My Cloud is connected to.
• Turn on just the gateway/router and wait for it to boot up.
• Turn on the PC and wait for it to finish booting into the OS.
• Turn on (plug in) the WD My Cloud and wait for the solid blue light to appear.
• Follow all of the steps EXACTLY as outlined in: How to set up a WD My Cloud, Mirror, EX2, or EX4 drive on a network for the first time. Make sure to create at least one account. Do not make any other changes beyond what is needed to set the device up as detailed in the previous “How To” URL link.
• Access the WD My Cloud with the newly created username/password with a web browser.
• Proceed to set a Static IP in the WD My Cloud as outlined in the WD My Cloud User Manual. See Chapter 10, Network, Changing Network Mode from DHCP to Static and follow the steps EXACTLY to setup the Static IP information. Taking care to use the same network name and IP address pool as the PC that is being used to configure the WD My Cloud.
• If possible access the gateway/router administration page and set the WD My Cloud IP Address to “static” or “reserved” so the gateway/router DHCP server does not hand out that IP address to another DHCP client.

I would not try to get cute with changing things at this stage to make things more secure. I’d make sure everything was running properly before changing the network security settings to lock down the WD My Cloud.

Only when I was able to access the WD My Cloud drive constantly through Windows Explorer and via a web browser would I then proceed to configuring the WD My Cloud Desktop app and the WD Smartware software. I would not turn on any other network devices until I had the WD My Cloud working properly. Then I’d turn things on one device at a time to ensure it doesn’t interfere with the WD My Cloud.

For most people the directions above would be overkill but since you obviously have some sort of issue going on that is preventing access to the WD My Cloud, going one step at a time may help isolate or eliminate the issue preventing access to the WD My Cloud.

[Domainer]

OK.  I’ll let you know.  

Although the stuff I have on there is incomplete, I need it all I can salvage.  So I am running a full system diagnostic on it at the moment to check for hdd errors & bad sectors and the like.  

I did get a media server database error, so I think there must be something wrong, big time, with the drive itself.  It couldn’t rebuild the database, as it gave me another error (a couple times) when I attempted that.

So I ran out and grabbed a 1 TB Expansion+ portable drive to back-up everything that’s left on that WD My Cloud NAS drive using the USB 3.0 port before I try to do any Restores (as the WD device dashboard admin software recommends).

We’ll see.  

Thanks, by the way.  You’ve been a great help, Bennor.

[Domainer]

Just out of curiosity, does anyone else have 2 Bonjours?  

I have 2.  They are both version 2.0.2.0.  One is 1.74 MB and the ‘Bonjour Print Services’ one is 3.21 MB.  

I know that HP installed one for my Photosmart e-all-in-one.

And I know the WD uses it, too.  

That isn’t it, is it?  

[Domainer]

Jeepers.

USB internal server error.

I plugged it in while it was doing its diagnostic test.  It was at 80%.

I mean, you are supposed to be able to plug USB stuff in even when there is something going on.  

It feels like I won’t even get this thing home on a slow hobble.  I need that data.

Chriminey.

[lluna]

You should be able to plug in the drive on the USB port, but as the drive is extremely busy when doing a check on the disk but throw that error.

Are you able to access the drive without using the smartware, like just from the “run” on your windows computer? 

[Domainer]

I can ping it.  But Explorer doesn’t see it.  

I just did a reboot after it passed the full drive check.

Still getting the Content Scan Error on the home page of the dashboard.  I think I have to do like Bennor said.  Unless the two Bonjours might be the problem.  

I turned of media serving though, way too many errors there when I am in the dashboard.

[lluna]

Do you have any other computer that is having the same issue, this is really weird and I’ve neve seen it before

[Domainer]

I think part of the problem is that I tried to get it working once and couldn’t.

I mean, I installed all this stuff once.  Then, I worked hard on getting it to work, but it didn’t.  And my record with WD stuff **bleep**.  I mean, I have never bought a single thing from WD that worked reliably since 1992.  That being the case though, when My Seagate failed I tried Maxtor.  When the Maxtor Failed I tried WD.  No External HDD has ever been reliable for more than a few months, ever, with me.

So I blew it off thinking that at least it worked and I would get around to getting the hard drive backup program working.  I was just copying files over.  But then I copied my website directory over.  Tons of little tiny image files and text files, in tons of directories.  It choked.  I thought, another hard drive error from another WD device.  

But that might be the media server database issue.  I have icons, favicons, logos for every site, ads, photos in every single image directory for every site, well over a couple hundred sites archived in the websites directory.  

If it ran into any issue there on the source drive, it could have been copied to the target drive, or just made the backup/copying choke.  And the source boot drive is what just went down, I could never get that directory backed-up no matter how hard I tried to copy stuff to any HDD.

The point being that after the boot drive went down, I had no option but to install fresh Windows 7.  Whether it was a hard drive error or a virus didn’t matter, I couldn’t trust any of my previous cloned HDD copies.  Something has been creating a problem for a very long time.  Time to ditch the issue altogether.

I can try and see what happens on another computer.  But I think that because I have installed WD My Cloud twice (each time fresh) from one laptop as one admin user and never had the same result the second install, something messed up.

I do have to backup the system and try to recover, but I will try from a different PC.

[Domainer]

I’m kind of an emotional person.  

It’s a good thing no one here knows how betrayed I feel right now.  You don’t here me cussing.  You don’t know my deep depression.  I embraced computers in the 1970’s and I couldn’t wait to be able to get one.  My father and brother laughed at me, as they were as big as a large room back then.  

I told them everyone would have one.  That they would be the size of the typewriter I am learning typing on, because I would use one, and that eventually they would fit in my pocket, even get smaller.  They laughed as if I was a kook.

Ever here of loyalty?

I was loyal to Amiga until its premature death.

I buy HDD drives all the time.  Its a requirement of this industry.  They will always fail.  The trick is moving the data to a new device in time.

But, I have NEVER owned a WD HDD that worked reliably.  I am talking brand new, they never worked for me.  Not once.  I usually get my money back because they fail immediately.  I buy them with errors and they just fail soon after.  Not once in my lifetime have I ever bought a decent WD product.

My most reliable brand is Seagate, but they will fail as well.  When my Seagate drive failed, I got upset and I start purchasing Maxtor.  Those usually work a while, until just outside of the warranty period.   So then I try something else.  The only HDD product that lived the life of my machine was an IBM DeskStar, and IBM doesn’t make those anymore.

So you wonder why I am here?  Why did I buy one of these things with that kind of record?  It’s pride.  We have a factory in Siooux Falls that makes parts for Western Digital.  My best friend was a senior tech at Gateway when it was in town.  He swears by WD and NEVER ONCE has ever had any sort of a problem with Western Digital.  EVER!

Why is it I get all the WD crappy lemons?

I can’t even connect a brand spanking new USB HDD to my My Cloud and backup, it just spins its wheels for an hour and errors.  

I’m going to lose all my graphics and websites, aren’t I, Western Digital?  I could have been a loyal user, but you insist on making an enemy of me.  

[lluna]

I have passed this along to support, please check your private messages.

[cpt_paranoia]

Don’t take probability personally…

Take backups very seriously.

Ask yourself if there’s anything you’re doing that’s making devices fail.

What’s your environment like?

Hot?

Humid?

Unstable electric supply?

Lightning storms frequent?

Dust?

Drops?

Vibration?

Not ejecting safely before unplugging?

Static discharge?

[Domainer]

What’s your environment like?

Hot? No, I run a room air conditioner all summer (it makes way too much noise) to make sure it is OK.

Humid? Well, it is South Dakota.  It is always humid here.

Unstable electric supply? The same electrical supply as what the Seagate and IBM and Hitatchi and Toshiba drives (3 prong plug with anti-surge protection).  

Lightning storms frequent? Haven’t been hit yet.  

Dust? Yeah.  Lots of dust.  

Drops? No.

Vibration? Only from itself.

Not ejecting safely before unplugging? No.

Static discharge? No.

You are really grasping for straws here.  I have always had issues with WD products WHEN I BUY THEM, immediately after purchase.  

I buy a lot of drives.  I have 9 sitting next to me that I want to check for archival, put everything on one drive.  Never can get a reliable HDD big enough for it all.  It started with the Seagate, I had to send it in (it still isn’t reliable, but its running out and I am trying to get the data off it).  Then the Maxtor, it had never worked right when I bought it, but I was so **bleep** busy with freelance jobs it was out of warranty before it actually failed.  Maxtor is owned by Seagate.  My internal 1 TB Seagate Hybrid drive failed, Seagates don’t usually fail for me, but I was mad, so I decided to give WD a try.  

The first thing I tried was to get it backing things up.  But I have a life.  I have been working on it for days on end.  I am supposed to be meeting with clients, not trouble shooting brand new **bleep** products that don’t work.  

Do I lose power once in a while?  Yeah, you bet I do, so does half the country.  That’s a part of life.  But I don’t lose power and then the drive is bad, it is bad when I bring it home.  If I send it in, they will refurb it with used parts and it will **bleep** even worse, only sorta working.  That happens with HDDs, tablets and netbooks.  

But, you really don’t get it.  Everything else works fine.  Until lately I have never had any issues with any other HDDs.  Then the Seagate was sent back and still is not reliable (but was dead before), then the Maxtor was **bleep**.  The Maxtor was **bleep** right from the begining, I was just way too busy to do anything about it.  Then the internal Seagate went bad.  OK, it was stupid to buy a hybrid drive.  Even more stupid to sell it.  So I gave WD a chance and got another crappy lemon.

I have more hard drives in my closet.  

No, the house has never been hit by lightning.  No, I disabled software updates so that it wouldn’t write to itself when we had a storm.  No, every other drive I buy that isn’t Westerb Digital WORKS for the warranty period except the Maxtor.  

On top of this, I am buying consumer gear.  This is not a clean room.  My other hard drives and devices work fine.  The PC across the hall and the netbook kitty corner across do NOT have air conditioning in their rooms and those PCs and HDDs have been working for years (I don’t know what is in the Netbook, but there is at least one Seagate in the PC).

Please do not make excuses for **bleep**. 

[Ralphael]

So Domainer after watching your post for the last  week or so, I thought I chime in to let you know that you are not crazy…

I was one of the first owners of a Drobo unit back in the days when Seagate first came out with their 1.5TB drives. Although I did not use Seagate back then, I was more of the WD Green fan, I kept reading the high failure rate of the seagates on the Drobo community. It got so bad that the community had to be locked down to owners only and those who had failures were basically deleted from the forums and kicked out. In the end, after I witness the high failure rate, I sold my drobo and was subsequently kicked out of Drobo’s forums. It was a combination of seagate timing problem and drobo that caused the cascade failures that they had.

You will get more failures with Seagate (good thing this is the WD forums) because, as some says, the high RPM making it run hot.

Here is an article on what drives to get… I think Google has a graph too on their hard drive failure rate.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

Even with my green drives, I have had numerous failures but I never look at them as failures but just another drive that is gone; because they all do eventually some sooner then others. Although you may not have had any problems with your laptop, it is just that you don’t run your laptop 24/7/

Even with WD, there is that 8 second parking with some of their drives (especially the green drives) that you have to disable otherwise the hard drive will park itself to death as some users’ claims.

So yes, bad draw of the cards, maybe, but if you have been choosing Seagates you may be getting more bad cards than you think.

Now with the WD Cloud, there are definite some software problems and it may not have to do with the drive itself. If you have already swapped your brand new Cloud with WD already then you would also have gotten a re-furbished drive, contributing even further to the possibility of a bad drive.

I had a catostrophic Raid failure in the early 1990s, when I thought raid 5 was perfect for having only one copy of my data, since it takes two drive failures before you lose your data; well two drives failed and I lost all my data. Thus these days I always use manual mirroring. One drive fails, I will always have a copy of the other. 

No I still don’t trust drives like the ex2 which does the mirroring for me. The problem is that if the unit fails, I am still out of luck, although I could take the non-failed drive and plug it into my Mac and copy the data out, what if the drive mirrored my bad data?

Thus I always buy my drives in pairs. In the case of my 4tb Cloud, I bought a USB 4tb my book and used a program called Beyond Compare to compare the changed data and copy only the changes. 

Always have a backup copy on a drive that isn’t “on” all the time.  My connected USB drive goes to sleep when it isn’t being accessed. 

I have no immediate answers for you but just trying to throw in  my two cents.

Good luck

[Domainer]

Thanks.

It appears I no longer have access to the My Cloud. What a consumer oriented name/brand.

So I wait for tech support. The thing is, I registered the drive again with the wrong purchase date. But in order to get tech support I had to register it. So I had no choice.

The website told me I had no support options, which is why I wound-up here.

I really do not care if a drive fails outside the warranty period. But when I have been trying to get it working for 6 months, not having it is crippling me over and over in more than a dozen ways.

My Seagate external is OK, but once it powers down it has a hard time waking back up.

I replaced the internal laptop hybrid drive that failed (it is newer than the My Cloud) with a Samsung SSD.

What kills me is that I wanted to be a WD customer but have never had a good one. And I am talking brand new I return them because they didn’t work.

But EVERY TIME? I hate it. EVERY SINGLE TIME. I wind-up buying off brand stuff sometimes and it works.

But this has been a problem for me since I got an Amiga I could put a $500.00 250 MB HDD in… I have just never had a WDD purchase work for me. And that is kind of scary because what the **bleep** are the odds?

They have to be one in a gazillion. I have bought a lot of drives and I kept trying WD.

One time my mother had a WD in her stock computer and it made it just past warranty.

And then my friend has never had an issue with any WD device other than old age and replacing a well worn drive that had a long life.

As far as my PC being on a lot, it is. Not always 24/7, but this is my life… creating logos, graphics and websites. So I am stuck at it 8 to 16 hours a day. Sometimes I play games too… well, the wife will tell you too much, on top of the 6 or 7 days a week.

If I get tired and I need to pass out, I just leave it on forgetting to at least put it in hybernation mode.

So this laptop I use is a saving grace. Old reliable. But the HDDs will come and go. I just need them to work right for the warranty period.

That’s all I ask for in every drive… but my Seagate, now refurbed, is also in its last legs. So when this one fails I can’t backup my internal hard drive, or my photos and archives and HDD backups that are on the external. Plus my son, wife and mom expect to backup someday. I look like a joke to them. And its not because I can’t do something, it’s catastrophic equipment failure.

[Ralphael]

So Domainer, as I said before, the cloud does have software issues and combinef with your tendency towards breakage you may have some difficulties getting it to work reliably, but if you can get “one” to work, buy another one and get that to work also, so you have two clouds; one for backup. However conversely, if you cannot get one to work, don’t buy another cloud.

Why I said the above is that if you can get one to work then you are familiar with the device and thus the success rate of getting another cloud to work will guarantee the success of both; eliminating the problem of having to work through the complexities of todays products. Every single product out there has their own problems, with the Cloud having more then the others

This is my reason with staying with the Cloud product today since I know its idiosyncrasis. Like cpt_paranoia who just bought another 2TB because the Cloud is cheaper than the hard drive by itself, it takes him less then ten minutes to set it all up. 

For your future success with hard drives, buy in quantities of two or threes. I use to do that quite often when I build home servers, raid devices where I would buy three motherboards, three identical cases, multiple hard drives so I can swap in or out a hard drive instantly.

Thus if one doesn’t work, change over to the other one and if you get three, one of them must work. Once you get one working, the other two should work afterwards. Perhaps it might be more expensive this way but It gives you better odds. Once everything is working, back up your data two or three times or even more. There is nothing wrong with keeping multiple copies of your data since in reality hard drives are cheap in comparison to the days of Amiga. 

Keep us posted on your successes or failures. 

[Domainer]

I can no longer access the WD My Cloud through the WD My Cloud software or the device IP in my browser.  

I tried to reset it using a paperclip on the reset button within the case.  But when I held it holding it in for 4 seconds, I waited 3 minutes and nothing happened.  Tried it again and nothing.

Then I decided to hold it down for the 40 seconds.  So, I did it again, this time with a stopwatch app running on my phone.  I hit the stopwatch when I had the button depressed and held it until over 40 seconds went by.  Still nothing.

I guess I’ll try to call them if I don’t get an email reply to my tech support request, soon.  It still has over a year on the warranty.  I won’t have any choice but to do the warranty thing.

[Ralphael]

Well I wasn’t going to get involved but this one I am very familiar with… the 40 sec three hand reset

1. You have to unplug it.

2. hold the pin for 40 seconds (don’t know why but I did)

3. still holding the pin in, use your third hand to plug the device in

4. now wait, while white light comes on… and it will take between 3 to 6 to 2 weeks…

leave it alone.

Don’t touch it,

don’t unplug it.

Don’t jiggle it to make it faster.

I did this once after a firmware update (oh if you ever do get it working, turn off the firmware update because one day you come home and the device is bricked).

[Domainer]

Ralphael…

OK, Thanks.  I’ll try that.  I’ve been entertaining myself by trying to reorganize my older backups and make a master directory of all my newest stuff.  

I doubt I will get the WD My Cloud back, now.  WD Quick View knows its name, but that’s it.  My Cloud app and the web browser Dashboard fail to connect.   My Net View and WD Discovery verifies the same IP and host name as always.  WD SmartWare still acts the same, unable to connect.

[Domainer]

Just an update…

I tried the 40 sec reset again according to Ralphael’s instructions.  WD My Cloud Setup failed to add a user and I had an error trying to do it in the Dashboard.  The My Cloud app still doesn’t connect, although Quickview saw it and eventually reported OK for a temperature until after I ran the My Cloud Setup.  Now it just shows access to SmartWare, which also couldn’t log in.  My Net View sees it.

I was going through my old archive drives and just realised that I have a 2.5" external WD My Passport with USB 3 that I believe still works like a champ.  I have to check it for archives that I need to put together to rebuild some of my logos/graphics/websites/photos/video libraries, along with 8 other HDDs, as well.  So I do have 1 WD drive that works like a champ.  I think I bought it specifically to see if I could trust the My Cloud.

The original 2.5" internal hybrid drive that failed doesn’t seem recoverable, but that is me speaking from experience.  It is in warranty, but that doesn’t help me.  According to SeaTools, I should try a long test.  About to do that.

I will try the 40 second reset again after everyone goes to bed tonight.  

Thanks to everyone for their help.

[Domainer]

Lost Everything.

WD Quick View reports: 0% used, Unkown Temp.

After I did the second 40 second reset, it said 24% Used, or something similar.  With 0% used all my data is gone.  My graphics, logos and websites are one thing, but my photos, videos and texts interacting with family.

That just **bleep**.

Not one message or call from Western Digital other than someone telling me someone will contact me later.  

*Entering deep dark depression…*