I have a WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra that no longer obtains an IP address, and thus, I am unable to access the data on the drives. Here’s what I’ve done so far and what I’ve observed:
NAS status: Solid blue front LED, Link lights on and blinkingDevice shows up in Finder (Mac - Bonjour), but I cannot connect to it over the network.Router DHCP client list: The My Cloud is not listed, nor is it listed when running “arp -a” in Terminal
Plugged My Cloud directly to my Mac over Ethernet but could not find the device, assigning it an IP
Reset attempts:
Tried the short reset (4–5 seconds) with no change.
Tried the long reset (40 seconds, while powering on) and it still has a solid blue LED, network behavior is unchanged.
Note that the My Cloud EX2 Ultra is inaccessible because the device can not obtain an IP Address
Main questions:
Am I missing any recovery steps that may lead to fixing the My Cloud EX2 Ultra so that I can access my data like normal?
If the My Cloud hardware is just broken, is there any way to decrypt and read the drives outside of the NAS using Linux (I have the encryption password)?
Any migration guides or advice on where or how to move to a new NAS?
I recently switched routers and my previous router’s IP address was 10.0.1.1 and I had given the My Cloud a static IP of 10.0.1.16 through the router and the My Cloud > Settings > Network > IPv4 Network Mode: switched to static and given the IP 10.0.1.16. When I switched routers my new router had the IP address 10.0.0.1 which in turn made the My cloud impossible to connect to because it had a static IP address that was out of range and therefore would not connect. To solve this I plugged in my old router to my new router and the my cloud to the old router - I was then able to access the dashboard and change the network setting to DHCP.
I tried resetting the My Cloud using the button on the back, but it didn’t seem to work (either the 4-second or 40-second version) which should have reset this setting. There is no documentation on this or any similar problems online, hopefully this might help others.
If your WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra won’t get an IP, you’ve got two main options. First, try the basics like setting a static IP or loading recovery firmware to see if the box comes back. If it doesn’t, you can pull the drives and rebuild the RAID on a Linux system. If the drives weren’t encrypted, it’s a simple mdadm job; if they were, you can still unlock them with your password using cryptsetup. Once you’ve got your data, you can either drop the drives into another EX2 Ultra or move to something stronger like a Synology, QNAP, or even a DIY NAS that gives you more flexibility down the road.
