Hi Duke, I saw your cry for help, and I can suggest a couple of things, but you seem reasonably technical.
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First, there are a few different levels of ‘reset’ - the lowest level just changes all the user account settings and password for admin, but leaves the data on the disk. e.g. this story… and this one
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Have you tried connecting to a PC via the USB3 port? If you are ‘lucky’, the network port is fried but that’s all, and the board OS is still operative. Get your data somewhere safe, then get WD to replace it.
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Did you have it backing up to the WD Cloud service? Are your photos there, maybe?
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If those are no good, the next thing I would want to try is getting the hard disk out of the unit and connecting it to a machine to see if its still working. This is warranty-voiding if you do it yourself, yet it might be worth doing if you really need the data. From what I’ve read, its very difficult to non-destructively disassemble, but not impossible.
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If the hard disk inside the MyCloud is dead, your next step is professional help from people who can do things like replace the drive circuit board, which is likely to be expensive and not guaranteed to work.
(I’m surprised WD are not able to work with you a bit more - might be worth calling them back to see if you can negotiate a pathway where you take it to a local tech who destructively tries to rescue your data, and they send you a replacement.)
Best of luck. Sometimes hardware failure causes real losses. I hope that hasn’t happened to you.
