Solid white LED on startup - no option but a hard reset?!

My 4TB My Cloud Home isn’t starting up - I’m getting a solid white LED on startup, as described in this support article:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/25297/kw/My%20cloud%20home%20solid%20white%20led

The drive seemed to be running slow yesterday, then today caused my mac’s Finder to crash, so I restarted it through the app. It didn’t become available again.

The support article suggests that the only solution is a hard reset, losing all the data?!

The drive is only three months old! I know the hardware will be covered under warranty, but I assume data recovery won’t be. There is three months of laptop and photo backups, and I’ve spent the last few weeks ripping and digitising my entire dvd collection - have I really lost the lot?!

Are there any other possible solutions other than losing all my data, or paying a presumably extortionate amount to one of WD’s third party partners to try and recover it?

Hello Tcadams,

It is always re commended to keep the data backed up on atleast two locations as it helps protection of data against data corruption, hardware issues or environmental hazards, etc. Moving data from your system drive to an external hard drive is not a backup, unless there is already a duplicate of the file on a different drive.

If you do not have the backup of your data on any other location, you can contact Drive Savers or OnTrack data recovery services as these are the only two companies that offer data recovery on My Cloud Home device. You can contact them by referring the link given below.

Tech_Wanderer - thanks for the patronising reply. FWIW I do have all files in one form or another - but had spent a significant number of hours organising from multiple other smaller drives, and ripping DVDs. This isn’t a disaster for me - it’s just a pain in the ass as I now have to spend that time all over again.

Of course I would ultimately have had a backup of the WD backup, and it’s my bad that I didn’t already (although I suspect I’m already far better with backups than the median home user). However, it is not unreasonable to expect a short grace period with a brand new hard drive - it should last more than two months. And it is not unreasonable to expect that if it does fail in two months, that there is more than one level of problem solving recommended by WD to try and fix it, rather than straight away returning the whole thing to factory settings.

Also, if the recommended solution of a factory reset does work (and I’ve not hit the button yet, so maybe it won’t), it does rather suggest that this isn’t a critical issue with the HDD itself. If that turns out to be the case, then WD having no way for me to attempt recovery of data other than paying minimum £300+VAT (for a £150 drive!) to a third party data recovery company to hack into WD’s own operating system to get at the data - well, that seems a pretty shocking oversight by WD to me.

@Tcadams so how is it now? I have the exactly same issue and the HK data recovery company (from WD list) asked for 1-2k USD to recover

I think unbrick can help, but I have no idea how to do after read those unbrick posts

@fung Hey, sorry to hear you’ve had this issue too. I don’t have good news for you - the factory reset didn’t work (the 60 second press of the reset button did nothing).

Because the drive was so new I was given a straight replacement by the retailer. Given that there are clearly reliability issues with these devices I would have preferred a refund. I’m now planning to use it primarily as my media server and invest in something more robust as my primary file backup.

I had to ask WD support to delete my My Cloud Home user account, because there is no way to just switch one drive for another in the app.

Good luck - hope you can get yours back to life again.

@Tcadams Good to know that it is a new drive, so you have no data to lose

just format the drive and use it as a normal backup drive without the WD cloud function is better if I were you, haha

Have a good day