Someone else might have already found this out, but I did not come across any post specifically about it in my searches, so sorry if it’s a double post…
Anyway last night I dusted off one of my other units WDTV Live units that was sitting in storage… As everyone is aware upgraded firmware has never been a highlight of this unit since the start, so for all these years I stuck with firmware 1.10.13 on my units simply because it worked for me and did what I needed, but after seeing many post about 2.01.86 being decent I decided to give it a spin, knowing I could always roll back… Since the unit I just took out of storage wasn’t going to be my primary unit it was a good candidate for ‘testing’ and my kids would not freak out with no access to the media server or Netflix…
So anyway, I download the 2.01.86 firmware and attempt to do an upgrade, and as has happened to other the unit rebooted and froze on the WDTV Live splash screen, never to continue to boot from that point… I gave it half an hour hoping it might recover and boot, but it never did… So I unplugged and rebooted to the dreaded black/red multi-language “Insert a USB drive with firmware to recover blah, blah, blah” screen…
So I proceeded to insert a USB drive with the 2.01.86 firmware, nothing happened… So I formated that USB stick and load it up with current 2.02.32 firmware, again nothing happened… At this point I’m pretty convinced the unit is bricked beyond recovery with a USB stick…
But, for kicks and one last try I decided to see if I could reload that vintage 1.10.13 firmware the unit had, I had downloaded a copy of that previous just in case I wanted to roll back…
http://download.wdc.com/wdtv/wdtvlivegen3_1.10.13.zip (I assume all legacy firmwares are still avaiable from WD if you just change the version number of that link to a valid firmware number)
To my surprise it instantly recovered from the USB stick with the vintage firmware and was back in action, I then proceeded to upgrade to 2.01.86 and all went smooth…
So anyone that believes they might have a bricked unit, try loading the USB stick with different legacy firmware versions and give each one a try, there must be some small difference between the firmware images that the low level “Insert a USB drive with firmware to recover blah, blah, blah” recovery firmware identifies with and works or doesn’t work…
