I’m amazed at the misinformation in this topic.’
Ping is one of the most basic network debugging tools. If you can ping an IP address then THAT is what the IP address of a device is. The correct MAC in the arp-cache indicates that device is the MBL. There is no DHCP because the device has been set to a static IP address and button pushing does nothing, indicating that boot-up is getting to green light but for some unknown reason the button is not being monitored. No amount of button pushing is going to get you anything. Further discussion of DHCP indicates whoever thinks that relevant is not paying attention. It’s not going to go from static IP address setting back to DHCP unless a reset works, and OP has proved that it doesn’t work.
Ports 80/443 not open indicates Apache service is not running (and no control panel). Inability to connect to shares indicates Samba service is not running. EVERY MBL owner should enable SSH just for emergencies even if they never intend to use it. (WD should have defaulted this service ON.) But if your other ports are closed my guess is that even if you had enabled SSH it wouldn’t have helped and would probably be not open.
Your comment about “typical rattling sound…” has me bothered. You should hear nothing but a humming sound when you put your ear near the grille. HDDs in good health do not rattle.
So let’s have a little bit of reality here. Irrespective of the green light your device is effectively bricked. You have a good chance your data is still valid (depending on what precipitated its becoming inoperable). Between ping response at the static address you set and presence of the MAC address in arp cache indicates connectivity at the basic Ethernet level is established. This is the bad part: there are no open ports that will give you any access and the button is not being monitored. Apache and Samba are not running. If you had enabled SSH it probably wouldn’t be running either. Effectively you have no way to interact with the MBL - effectively it is bricked.
At this point I see no alternative except to remove the HDD and attach it to some other device. Ideally you have a Linux desktop, second choice is a Windows PC. If Linux there are various tools that may give you more information (fdisk, gdisk, parted). You could mount the EXT3 partitions (your MBL OS) and depending on your setup (if it accepts GPT partitions) even mount the EXT4 shares partition. – There are various Windows tools mentioned elsewhere in this forum including R-Linux that allow some accesss from Windows – And finally you can create a live Linux CD and boot from that even if your PC is Windows, and gain full access to the HDD.
At this time I see a necessity to remove the HDD and gain access by one of the methods above. However I think even an expert would have problems figuring out what is wrong just by analyzing what they see, unless it is something gross like missing/corrupted partitions. (I fixed one brick because I remembered I mistakenly edited the fstab file on the wrong network device, so I was able to go in and un-edit it.) But you don’t know how you got here.
In closing I see two possibilities. Your rattling sound indicates an HDD failure to me if you are accurately describing the sound. If so, the HDD is still partially working and it may be possible to recover data before replacing the HDD. Depending on the size of HDD and apparently it’s not a DUO, you may be better off to just toss it and buy a new MBL since a replacement HDD may cost almost as much or more than a new MBL.
If your HDD is healthy, then I see the obvious conclusion that you will have to follow one of the debricking procedures. In these procedures you attach your MBL drive to a PC and boot from a Linux rescue CD (easily downloaded from the Internet and burned to a CD). You will also need a 4GB or larger USB stick to hold a new OS image and debricking script, and act as a scratch disk for the live CD. While this may sound very complicated it may be your only alternative. I just debricked a DUO a few days ago using this method and I was almost surprised it worked perfectly. I had almost decided to pull the HDDs and toss the DUO.
My advice is to decide if that noise you are hearing is normal for a healthy HDD. Even if not, debricking a broken HDD won’t do any harm and may help. So I think you should start studying how to debrick your MBL.