LED light is not on anymore

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
1

The blue LED light in front of MyCloud is not lit anymore. Not blue, not white, not any other color. It is completely off. I don’t know since when this happened, as MyCloud is tucked away in a cabinet.

Could anyone please tell me what this would mean? It appears MyCloud is still working. But I am not 100% sure of this.

Thank you.

Henry

2

Check that you haven’t disabled the LED via the Dashb9ard.

If not, and everything is still working, then your blue LED is broken, like mine is.

I don’t know how WD have managed to get LEDs to break, since they are generally very reliable, especially when running at very low brightness/power like they are on the MyCloud. But all electronic components can fail; be thankful it’s just the LED…

4

Thank you for reply.

Just realized that the LED is not faulty. When I switched off the modem cum router, the light came on! It was amber in color, like the normal incandescent light, NOT white as the User Manual said it should be. Seeing this, I switched off MyCloud as well.

After a few minutes, I switched on the modem-router first, waited for it to fully boot up, and then switched on MyCloud. There was flashing amber light, which turned solid amber after a while, and then it went off.

I think it is something more than just the LED. Since it is still under warranty, I intend to send it to WD for repair.

What do we normally do with the vast contents already in it before we send it in for repair or possibly replacement?

Thank you.

Henry

5

What you back up to is up to you. Everything that is on my My Cloud is also on my laptop and desktop computers. I also have a lot of it backed up on CD’s and DVD’s. I started yesterday backing up my important data to USB flash drives that I am going to place in my fireproof storage box.

If it is sensitive information that you do not want WD to have you should erase the drive.

cat0w
USA

6

Thank you. Lucky that the contents are still accessible.

Cheers!

Henry

7

I’d suggest it is just a faulty LED, if everything else is running properly.

In order to display multiple colours, the front panel indicator is created using either multiple discrete LEDs (yellow, red & blue, AFAICT), or a single, multi-colour led device, incorporating a number of led chips in a single package. Any of these can fail.

‘White’ appears to be implemented by turning on the yellow and blue LEDs. So, if your blue LED has failed, when you turn the MyCloud on, the normal startup sequence flashing white/solid white/solid blue will appear as flashing yellow/solid yellow/no light. Sound familiar?

But if you want to replace your device with a returned drive under the RMA warranty, that’s your choice.

8

I will add this to cpt_paranoia post. More videos on this, LED’s, can be found doing a Google search. Lab Rat’s had a good one but I don’t remember what episode they talked about LED’s.

cat0w
USA

9

That reminds me of material science during college time! :sweat:

Henry

10

If you can still access the file server, the Dashboard, the media server, SSH, do remote access, etc, then I’d say it’s all working bar the LED. You could use Settings/Utilities/System Diagnostics to see if it thinks it is healthy.

1 Like
11

Thank you for your suggestions. Maybe you are right. Just ignore the LED. I ran System Diagnostics as you suggested. It passed a Quick Test. Full Test is still in progress.

I bought MyCloud in Sep 2014. The computer that I used to set it up was later replaced some months ago. My record shows that I did so with 5 programs, in the following order:

(i) WD MyCloud mc_windows_setup.exe
(ii) WD SmartWare Installer.exe
(iii) WDMyCloud_win.exe
(iv) WD Quick View Setup.exe
(v) WDDiscovery.msi

I also remembered upgrading the firmware sometime ago. It is now v4.04.01-112.

What I found was that without the software mentioned above, MyCloud can be accessed from 4 computers on my home wifi network in 3 ways:

  1. via Network, it shows up under \WDMYCLOUD (except from a laptop running Win 10, a separate issue we’ll deal with later. It was ok previously when running Win 8.1)
  2. via a browser (I use Chrome) under 192.168.1.20/UI/
  3. sign in via the browser under https://files.mycloud.com/

A question: do I really need to install the above software, maybe some, not all? I understand the setup process is different for firmware v4?

Henry

12

You don’t need any of that software to set the device up, or use it (although WD encourage you to do so, presumably in the belief that helps most users; I’m not convinced it does…). The device can be controlled entirely from the Dashboard, which is built in to the device.

Smartware is an optional backup program, but any other backup program can be used.

The MyCloud desktop app can be used to access the device, but it is generally better to map the device into your computer’s file system, and use the native file manager; windows explorer or Finder.

If you haven’t already, I would recommend you download and read the User Manual.

13

After more than 5 hours the Full Test just completed. It passed the test!

Thank you for the info on WD software. I’ll happily go without them. I did map a share of MyCloud as a drive on my computer. I found it slowed down boot-up of my computer. So, I removed it later, since I can still easily access it when needed without it being a mapped drive. Moreover, I don’t need it as a mapped drive when running robocopy .cmd scripts to back up my data.

All looks well, except from the Win 10 laptop. It does not show up MyCloud automatically when I click Network, as the other computers (2 desktops running Win 7 & another laptop running Vista) do. It shows up other computers on the wifi network if they are on. However, if I manually key in \WDMYCLOUD in the address bar of Win Explorer it does get connected.

What do I do so that \WDMYCLOUD automatically shows up as well on this Win 10 laptop when I click Network? I need to add that WDMyCloud does show up under Media Devices & Storage categories, but not under Computer whereas it appears in all 3 categories on the other 3 computers.

Thank you.

Henry

P/S: I had indeed downloaded the User Manual 4779-705103.pdf. At first I thought it was the same as the one I had earlier since it bears the same document name. Then I noticed on the very first page that it is for MyCloud with firmware v4. Wonder why WD could not give it a different name to differentiate it from the old one !

14

When you are in the file explorer on the windows 10 laptop. Click on the refresh icon just to the left of the search network line. ON my laptop running windows 10 this works.

RAC

15

Read the sticky post on Windows 10 issues at the top of the forum.

16

[quote=“LimHenry, post:13, topic:145966, full:true”]
All looks well, except from the Win 10 laptop. It does not show up MyCloud automatically when I click Network, as the other computers (2 desktops running Win 7 & another laptop running Vista) do. It shows up other computers on the wifi network if they are on. However, if I manually key in \WDMYCLOUD in the address bar of Win Explorer it does get connected.[/quote]
See the tacked thread at the top of this subforum…

https://community.wd.com/t/compilation-of-windows-10-methods-steps-and-solutions/142576

17

RAC, I did that several times before. It didn’t help.

Henry

18

Thank you Bennor for the pointers.

  1. From day 1, my router was set to reserve a static IP address 192.168.1.20 for MyCloud.
  2. From day 1, IP address was also set to the same static address in MyCloud.
  3. I followed Win 10 Specific Method 1 to enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP. Before that it wasn’t enabled. This was the only change I needed to make following the Steps and Solutions.
  4. my home wifi network had already been made to be private network from the beginning.
  5. Network Discovery and File Sharing was one of the areas that I looked into as soon as I had the problem. It was not the cause. Otherwise from the Win 10 laptop I wouldn’t see other computers on the same wifi network.
  6. The refresh button or F5 had been hit many times before.

So far, no luck yet.

I haven’t tried Win 10 Specific Method 6. Must read further before deciding what to do.

As mentioned before, I can connect to MyCloud when I manually type \WDMYCLOUD in the address bar of Win Explorer. It just wouldn’t show up under “computer”.

Cheers!

Henry

19

I had the same with one Win 10 PC, could reach the My Cloud either by IP address or by specific My Cloud name but it wouldn’t show up under Computer. Using one of the SMB fix options in method 6 worked for me. YMMV.

20

If you ssh into the My Cloud. There are two files that indicate what the led should currently
be set to.
/sys/class/leds/system_led/color
/sys/class/leds/system_led/blink

You can either cat or more these files. My currently say blue and on.

RAC

PS These are the possible values status is the blink file.
status = on|off|yes|no (yes|no is to control blinking)
color = red|blue|green|yellow|white

21

I called up Windows PowerShell & put in the Get-SmbConnection command. Yup, it showed only itself & this desktop computer I use to visit this forum. MyCloud was not there. Without doing anything else I closed the command window.

Somehow, not knowing why, I clicked the Network icon after closing the Windows PowrShell window. Lo & behold! WDMYCLOUD showed up under “Computer” category!!! However, when I double clicked the WDMYCLOUD icon, it didn’t go into it. Instead, I got this error message: Network Error Windows cannot access \WDMYCLOUD and so on.

1366×719 76.1 KB

I tried typing in \WDMYCLOUD in the address bar of Win Explorer. This time, it wouldn’t connect to MyCloud. It would before, as mentioned in earlier posts above.

???

Henry