Over the last few weeks I have read a dozen or more posts about the eternal, flashing blue light. I had that myself, letting it go for as long as 5 days. After a series of trial-and-error, here’s what worked for me.
The theory… Could it be that all the drives’ file structures are corrupted, precluding the device from getting past the boot stage? And not the unit itself?
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I took one of the drives that had backup data on it. I knew that I didn’t need the data. (Or use any drive that doesn’t have data on it that you need).
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I hooked it up to my Windows PC via USB connection.
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Open up “Disk Management” (Just hit the search bar).
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Find the disc. You might have to Initialize it first? I don’t recall exactly.
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You’ll have 3-4 partitions (Drive letters E, F, G, etc.) A few might be labeled RAW. Just delete every one of
them until you have a single space on the drive. -
Create a new partition. One big one. Then format it with NTSF.
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Put that drive alone into the EX4 and fire it up.
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Give it a while to boot up. It took a couple hours for me. BOOM! Finally, I was in! Making progress.
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Open the web page, admin panel and add a new volume.
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Check for any updates. (I know, this is controversial. But I would imagine WD continues to fix bugs and improve performance). I installed the latest update.
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Give it a proper shutdown. Hold the power button until it shows, “Shutting Down”.
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Put the next drive in. For me, it was a RAID 1 pair. I put them in slots 3 and 4.
Side note: I’m not sure this matters. Perhaps, best to load the drives the way the EX4 was configured. For me, it was RAID 1 in slots 1 and 2. And JBOD in slots 3 and 4. It may have been better to load that first disc in slot 3, then.
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Give it some time. For me, I had done this mid-Saturday morning. By the late evening, it was still doing it’s thing. Power light flashing, Slot 1, solid blue. Slots 3-4, blinking in a random pattern. At least it wasn’t all the lights flashing in unison. Hmmm. this looks promising.
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By the next morning, I had a solid blue power light, a blue light in slots 1 and 3, and a red (purple maybe?) light in slot 4. I have a hunch I broke the RAID 1 connection for the reasons noted above. But it was ‘Houston, we have lift-off’.
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I go to the laptop, pull up the drive in Network in File Explorer and there she was. I had hundreds of random, numbered Volume folders. But I had the folder I needed with my data. It’s all copying over to another drive, NTSF formatted connected to the USB port on my laptop.
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Next step, once my data is confirmed all copied and secured (I will probably make a second copy. Rule #1. Always have two copies of your data, which I did not obey, trusting a WD RAID 1 setup would be safe).
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Re-format the drives as above and back in business.
My plans for the WD EX4 have changed from three years ago. At the time, OneDrive limited to 50 GB and 20,000 files. Now it’s 1 TB and no limit on the number of files. I have an Office 365 subscription (12 of them, in fact) for our business. We use OneDrive, SharePoint, and soon will be moving all our Dropbox files over ($150 a year per user is ridiculous. I get competitive, OneDrive cloud storage, Exchange business class email, SharePoint, online apps for collaboration, and the entire Office Business suite for that).
I purchased an Office 365 family plan for our family. For $99 a year, we get licenses for the entire Office suite, * and * 1 TB of OneDrive space… for 5 people!
I’ll keep the EX4 and drives as a backup store for OneDrive, turning it on perhaps once per quarter and copying stuff over.
Hope that helps, people. Please let me know if this works for you. Also, any questions. I think I covered it all, but may have missed something.
