The user manual for the My Cloud unit will detail what a red front LED means. Generally nothing good. First and foremost is to try and access the My Cloud Dashboard on the unit. If you can access the Dashboard then maybe the diagnostics popup dialog box or the notification icon will give you a clue as to the issue. However if the drive is unreachable, and the unit isn’t obtaining an IP address then the odds of it being a drive problem is probably likely.
There are videos that one can find on Youtube for how to “shuck” the My Cloud enclosure to extract the internal hard drive. From there one can attach that drive to a spare SATA adapter or a SATA docking station or a USB to SATA adapter and attempt to read the data using either a Linux PC (or boot disc/flash drive) or Windows with third party Linux drivers installed.
Yes. One can replace the My Cloud hard drive with a larger or smaller hard drive. Personally I’ve experimented over the years with using a 250GB hard drive all the way up to 12TB in a first gen My Cloud enclosure. Plenty of threads discuss the process “unbrick” a bare drive and there are also discussions on how to “clone” a smaller hard drive to a larger one for use in the My Cloud enclosure. If you haven’t done so already use the forum search feature (magnifying glass icon upper right) to find many past discussions on “cloning” and “unbricking”.
