Flashing blue power LED, no drive LEDs, no access

[virtualuk]

My EX4 (16TB) was really slowing down, it seems to happen with more frequency in the past year, but it is usually remedied with a reboot. This time when I rebooted I have the following:

• • a flashing blue power LED, flashes constantly at about 5 times a second
• • no drive LEDs are lit
• • the network LEDs on the back are solid green on the left and flickering green on the right
• • the fan appears to be running as I can feel cool air coming from the back
• • the display reads “Welcome to WD My Cloud EX4”
• • the up/down buttons to the right of the display are non-responsive
• • no access to the dashboard

I can’t tell if the drives are actually spinning up or not, there’s too much other noise in the area where the NAS is located.

I’m not sure if the box is performing a drive test or not but I thought I remembered the last time it did that, that the drive LEDs would blink during the process.

Just prior to rebooting, the unit did say on the front panel that there was a firmware upgrade available. I thought I had it set for manual upload rather than automatic upload.

I’ve had so many issues with this unit in terms of (lack of) performance, crashed HDs, etc. that at this point I’m just hoping the data is still available on the drives and I can load them into a linux PC and access them that way. Before I go down that route, has anyone seen an EX4 act in this way, should I just leave the unit plugged in and check back tomorrow (previous disk checks have taken over a day to complete), or am I SOL?

[virtualuk]

At this point, there is no change in the condition of the drive. I’m going to try the 4 second reset and if that doesn’t work, the 40 second reset, and if that doesn’t work I’ll pull out the drives and mount on a linux setup in an attempt to recover the data

[virtualuk]

Neither the 4 second nor the 40 second reset made the unit responsive. Time to try and recover the drives via a linux setup and retire the EX4 to the scrap heap.

[virtualuk]

Final update - All four drives were put into a new linux box that had 6 SATA interfaces (, along with another SSD). I installed Ubuntu on the SSD and just like magic it detected the RAID5 partitions from the drives extracted from my EX4. Thankfully all the data is still there and intact, and now I don’t have to suffer from ridiculously slow transfers and reboots (, plus I’ll be able to run some useful software on it for a change).