New User -- 1.01.11 BRICKED me!

I just bought a new WD Live on Saturday at Best Buy.   It came out of the box with version 1.01.01 installed on it.  Of course, it wanted to do a firmware upgrade.   After seeing all the posts on the issues with 1.0.12, I wasn’t worried since it was going to upgrade to 1.01.11.   

Well, the exact same symptoms happened…  It was bricked doing an Internet download to 1.01.11.   It loaded it, then rebooted, stayed on the “WD” Logo for like 30 minutes, so I powered it off and back on.   “Insert a USB device with firmware to recover…”  which didn’t work.  Tried every suggestion in the manual and this forum…  No luck.

I had to take it back to a different BB since I bought the last one.   The one I exchanged it for came out of the box with version 1.01.00 installed on it, so it was slightly older than the first one.   This time I upgraded the firmware manually with a USB stick (same one I had prepared to try to “recover” the first one.)   Firmware updated just fine.

I didn’t see any mention in the forums about 1.01.11 bricking units…   But apparently an Internet upgrade from 1.01.01 to 1.01.11 may just do it…

Anyway, so far so good.   Sort of…  It definately still has bugs in it (I crashed it twice this morning just trying to view a Network Share for videos…)   

I’m trying to understand here why do people insist on updating through internet - is it hard to download it and put it on a USB stick ?  I think it would be safer to do so especially for firmware < .17

I believe there were some units which bricked when updating to .11 but not as many as the .12 update. You should have updated to .17 as this includes all the .11 updates and a more robust upgrade manager. You will need this if you don’t want further ‘bricks’ in the future. Do it via a USB flash drive without any other drives plugged in and leave it until it finishes. It may reboot a couple of times until it is finished.