No Blue Light

Hi -

I’m having some strange behavior with one of my two My Cloud devices. It seems to be a little bit like some of the other threads, but not exactly, so I thought maybe a new thread was appropriate.

As I stated above - I have 2 devices - a 3TB My Cloud which is my primary backup, and a 4TB My Cloud which was acquired primarily as a SafePoint device. It is the 3TB device that is having the problems. I saw the following over several days.

  1. I got a message on my Laptop (running Windows 10) that it had lost connectivity with the 3TB device. I got this message while futzing with a new video camera, and so discounted it and did nothing.

  2. A couple of days later, I noticed a similar message, and so took a look at the MyCloud. I noticed that the blue light was off. Prior to this point, I had last paid attention to anything on the device on July 4, when I updated the safe point. I though perhaps I had lost power to the device at some point, although couldn’t specifically remember any time that I was aware of. But then again, it’s summer and we get storms, and my power company likes to have short duration power outages so we can all reset the clocks.

  3. I checked the dashboard, and it was having trouble loading, so I decided I needed to power cycle the device. I went to the device, and noticed that the activity light on the back of the device was active, and I could feel disk activity in the box. I wasn’t sure what was going on, so I unplugged the power, waited about 5 seconds, then plugged it in again. I got a solid white light on the front panel, which after a few minutes started to flash. This continued for about 5 minutes, than went back to solid white again. This stayed on for a while and then went out.

  4. I checked the dashboard again, and there was some strange behavior noted. The data portions (users, shares, disk usage), seemed to be providing the appropriate info. But the firmware level was showing what appeared to be the base release v04.04.00-101 (I think it said). It was about 3:00 AM by now, so I decided to sleep on the problem, and see if the device status changed while I slept.

  5. Earlier today I went back to the device - it was still reporting the same info. I clicked on the arrow to the right of the firmware release on the dashboard, with the idea that I probably should do a firmware update, but the update immediately started to download - no “Do you really want to?” messages. I was surprised, but this was what I thought was a logical next step anyway, but still had some questions, not the least of which was “What happened to all of the prior upgrades?” The device had been current the last time I checked, and the 4TB device showed release V04.05.00-315. I let the machine do it’s thing, and went to do other things.

  6. I came back to the machine over an hour later, and no activity was showing, I assumed the reboot after the firmware update had failed, so I rebooted the 3TB device manually again. It went through the same LED routine as described above. After the LED went out, I checked the dashboard. The firmware level was now shoeing the correct level and access to the device seemed to be OK. I checked access from my Laptop, and could access the device. I moved files to the MyCloud successfully, so I started up SmartWare. I checked the backup status, and all seemed normal. I had been reading the community forums while all this was going on, and thought “must just be a blue LED failure.” Not a perfect answer, but I could live with it. But I had seen the post suggesting it might be the Energy Saver setting being off, so I went to the Settings > General page on the dashboard, and I found that not only was that setting grayed out, but I couldn’t move the switch. In fact, all of the settings were gray, including the one for Time Machine backups. My wife has a Mac desktop that has been having problems with Time Machine backups, and I though “AHA”. I checked the 4TB machine, and the settings were as one would expect - the sliders were normal, Time Machine was on, etc. I was puzzled again.

  7. I went back to the 3TB machine’s dashboard. Earlier in the day, I had checked the SafePoint status, and had found it had last been updated on July 4. I started a manual SafePoint update at that time. Now when I looked it showed 100% of the data had been moved, but was still waiting for the activity to complete - a situation I had seen before, and usually resolved itself over time. I had rebooted my Laptop while all this was going on as an update had been applied by Lenovo, and was required, so I let it reboot. I got a message some time later saying that it couldn’t access the WD MyCloud device again. I went back to SmartWare, and it knows there is the 3TB device is there, shows the serial number, but says logon is required. I tried to map the drive through windows Disk Manager, and can see the basic structure, but not any files. I checked the Safepoint activity, and it took a while, but finally responded with a “copying - 100% copied status.”

SO - a is story - but I still don’t think it is running correctly. What does everyone think is going on? Is it just a blue LED failure, or is there more (I think so). Is there something else going on that I might have missed - perhaps a network issue? I should add that the two My Cloud devices have assigned IP addresses that never change. As I said before - doesn’t seem to match any other problems in the past.

Thanks for your time in reading this, and suggestions or questions of what to do.

If you want to see if the led is burnt out. SSH into the device and issue the following commands:
cat /sys/class/leds/system_led/blink
cat /sys/class/leds/system_led/color

blink should be on or off. Color should be blue if the system is functioning correctly.

PS there also are 4 files in the /tmp directory.
led_cur_st
led_cur_ev
led_err_st
led_err_ev

Excuse me RAC8006, but have I to setup SSH on? If yes, after that how can I enter to issue those commands? Thanks in advance

Go into the dashboard and enable SSH. Then you need to download the program putty. Then you can
use putty to SSH into the device. Then cd /
Then you should be able to run your commands.

I could reach till /sys/class/leds/system_led but not more. I put dir on command line and PuTTy listed blink brightness color etc but I don´t know how I can access them and change parameters, Could you help me with more details? My Cloud works perfect but I´m dislike with the blue light off. Thanks

You can cd /sys/class/leds/system_led Then cat each file. Then you could edit the file.