My first post, hope this helps…
Power switch mystery solved, (At least on my unit). Sorry if this gets technical.
I’ve had my Live hub for just over a month and last night I joined the re-booting club!
Like others here it got to the “loading” stage and then shut down.
I bookmarked this forum while researching before purchase, but missed this issue.
Many thanks to those here who have already done the hard work of pointing to the problem area.
I bought mine via eBay, new and sealed but may have been a private seller so little comeback. (UK)
Having read of the slow response to replacements, plus over a weeks work loading and setting up
the player it did not want to loose all that; so decided to take matters into my own hands.
Now retired, I have worked as an engineer in electronics for the past thirty years and have had
to diagnose & cure similar “production issues” in the past, so tackling this was not very daunting.
As has been said, disconnecting the power button PCB stops the problem but now why…
The switch circuit is very simple, a 4-pin connector -2 pins are ground (groundplane on PCB), the next
pin is the logic switching signal and the fourth is +V supply (probably 5 or 12V but didn’t measure this).
The supply line has a 0.1uf decoupling capacitor followed by a 4K7 resistor, this is the pull-up to logic
high for the switch. The momentary switch shorts to ground providing the “low” start or shut-down signal.
This switch looks a little fragile for the weight of the average thumb pressing on it, plus the tactile feedback from
the click is very poor; leading to the temptation to press even harder. But that’s another story.
My first action was to check the switch resistance, ok shorted to ground fine, but when it was supposed to
be open it measured about 160 ohms across the contacts, well within the “low” state, so permanently “on”.
I suspected cheap & nasty switch (which it is!) but to my surprise it was OK. Very little else to cause this reading
of 160 ohms, I studied the PCB under a microscope and could not trace or see any shorts.
Finally came to the connector, the four pins on the underside of the board had flux residue between the pins
This proved quite stubborn to remove even with correct cleaner, but once clean the low resistance had gone!
No sign of poor solder joints anywhere. I’ve come across this before with surface-mount pins where solder paste
gets into the flux which then sets to a thick paste containing a partially conductive medium. Not good news!
The answer: CLEAN THE PCB’s BETTER. (Bring back good old solvent cleaners)
I had to replace the switch so fitted a more robust component (with a little difficulty). All reassembled a running
again. This was diagnosed & fixed in an afternoon, surely WD have the recourses to do this, really shameful
given how many complaints are on here and how long this has been going on. Probably all about cost!
Not all with this symptom may have this fault but as set flux can change with temperature this may explain why it
takes a while in a warm enclosure for this problem to arise, plus the flexing caused by switch operation.
I checked the 12v 2A psu on a load of 2A and it only dropped to 11.9v so that should not cause a problem.
I realise few here may have the skills & tools (or desire) to do this work, so I guess you’re stuck with RMA route.
Hopefully WD will take note of my findings and change their production practice, -we live in hope?
One off-topic question: Has anyone taken the HDD out and read it on a PC?, I think it’s NTFS format.
Just in case I get a more disastrous failure. Of course I do have backups, not safe to store all your eggs in a
terabyte basket!
Sorry for the long post but I hope it has been of interest and perhaps WD will rectify this soon.
Good luck, David
