Possibly Bricked Gen.3 SMP

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live Streaming
1

Gen.3 SMP suddenly – after 5 years of flawless service, required login credentials. Unable to solve the problem I resorted to Reset to Factory Default [in my case a very early firmware, 1.07.14]. For Network Setup, I selected Automatic Discovery, and what followed was a constant boot loop. This may have been because the default setting for Check for Firmware Update is ‘yes’. Regardless, after several hours of the boot loop, the home screen appeared w/o reboot but was frozen as clicking on Video or trying to move to Setup was impossible.

However, disconnecting the LAN cable the SMP behaved normally and I was able to watch a video from a thumb drive in the USB port. I manually input the Network settings but as soon as I reconnected the LAN cable the boot loop began again. After unplugging and restarting, I did another Reset Firmware to Default and made sure “check for updates” was off. While powered off, I reconnected the LAN cable, powered on and the same problem behavior began again.

One final note: I have a spare SMP that works fine with the LAN cable inserted – Network Shares
perform normally [meaning there is no computer handshake issue].

Any suggestions that might help me get it up and running would be most appreciated. Thanks in advance.

2

Wow that’s old firmare. In fact, according to the release notes, that version was never publicly released.

I would recommend you update your firmware to the last supported release (2.03.20, which was 14 versions newer than what you have now).

3

Thanks, Tony. That did the trick – all is good. We’re up and running again. Your suggestion was much appreciated!

I should add that the reason for the early firmware was to both avoid buggy later versions and later versions with support for features I didn’t need. That, and the flawless operation for a good many years. [Well, right up until very recently, that is :slight_smile: ].