11/13/2012 - SOLVED (for the blinking light on power-on). Okay this was a really dumb idea. But all I did when I turned it off and it wouldn’t turn back on (unplugged everything and kept the power off for at least 30 minutes and still only got the blinking light. I stuck the My Book in the freezer for 5 minutes. (Yes…that’s what I just did.)
Just took it out, with a cold plastic case, plugged it in, and it powered on perfectly.
I have never had to refrigerate a USB hard drive controlller to get it to reset, but this is totally new on me. Chill it.
The blog post to why I have 3 of the My Books and what I’m doing with them:
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Yes, solved - sort of. I actually bought 3 of them because the internal drives were cheaper than buying them raw.
First one had the powered on properly only after leaving the power supply unplugged from it for at least 6 hours (bad capacitors maybe?). Eventually that one gave up after about 3 days and never came back on.
Second one also has the 6 hours off, then it starts up fine, but only if the USB connector is unplugged when first turning it on and then pressing the power button and holding for a couple of seconds.
Third one I use as a swap-in for the SATA-USB boards.
One thing that is very suspicious is that if the power supply (wall wort) is swapped with the one that came with the 3rd unit then the unit starts up on the first try (at least very often compared with using the 2nd power supply.
I’ll probably put these 12VDC things on a multimeter to figure out why some of these are so out of spec, but that last comment about it being power supply-related seems to be on-target. Never quite gets enough current going to spin up the drives sometimes.
