I’ve had a WD My Cloud for approximately 4 years now.I recently was given one by a sibling with a bunch of data that belonged to me, and was working fine before it was unplugged.
When I plugged it in to hook up to my network, it’s hung up on a yellow/orange/amber LED. The device no longer shows up, and while connected to ethernet, only one light blinks intermittently. I’ve left it this way for hours with no change. I’ve also attempted a 40-second reset, and know it has worked as my phone no longer can find the drive anymore.
Despite that, I’ve rebooted this drive in the past, and it’s never taken more than 15 minutes at most. I still want my data off of it. But it’s still in “initializing” mode, and not talking to the network.
Network is the same, using a Ubiquiti Unifi network. I have another WD My Cloud that has no issues, so it is not network conflict.
Drive is the 00 variant, 4 TB.
Already tried different ethernet points, different ethernet cables. Plugging it directly into a PC changes nothing. All computers are Windows 10 OS.
The single bay My Cloud user manual (for the first gen v4.x firmware) has a section detailing what the various colors of the front LED indicate. See page 12 (http://products.wdc.com/library/UM/ENG/4779-705103.pdf#page=12) of the PDF. Generally a red solid front LED indicates:
• Disk thermal warning threshold
exceeded (under or over temp)
• Ethernet cable not connected
Or
• Disk SMART failure
• Data volume does not exist
• System volume does not exist
• System thermal shutdown (75 C)
The My Cloud Device’s front panel light is yellow and the unit’s Network
Adapter LEDs do not light.
Confirm the network cable is properly connected to the My Cloud device and the
network switch or router.
Make sure the network switch or router has power.
Use a different network cable and port on the network switch or router. Temporarily
swapping the My Cloud device’s cable port with a working network device may identify
any failing cables and ports.
If you have tried the basic troubleshooting steps; 40 second reset, different networking port on the router, putting a network switch between the My Cloud and router, use different ethernet cable, connecting the My Cloud directly to a computer using Ethernet. Then its possible the hard drive within the My Cloud has an issue that is preventing the proper loading of the unit firmware/OS. One can extract the hard drive from the My Cloud and connect it to a computer running Linux or a Linux driver to read the contents of the data partition (usually partition #4, which is in EXT4 format). From there one can recovery their data and copy it to another location. If connecting the My Cloud hard drive, using a USB to SATA (or docking station or spare SATA port) to a Windows computer one will need to use a third party Linux driver to read the contents of the data partition. Or use a Linux Boot Disc/Boot USB Flash Drive.
There are a number of methods to “unbrick” or recover a My Cloud hard drive back to working order. Most methods however do involve some knowledge of how to use Linux and Linux commands. If the hard drive has gone bad (not surprising given the age of the first gen single bay My Cloud units) one can replace the hard drive with a new (or newer) one using one of the various unbrick methods.
User Fox_exe has a set of unbricking directions for a first gen that works fairly well to replace the My Cloud hard drive. One could experiment with those directions and try to fix their existing My Cloud drive by skipping the sections on reformatting/partitioning the hard drive and go to the steps that detail how to push the IMG files to their corresponding partitions as indicated in the directions. As always proceed at your own risk!!!
@Bennor I have the same issue. I have almost 2TB of files I need to recover from my WD My Cloud drive.
I took the case apart and noticed on the circuit board a capacitor was ruptured. The hard drive has a solid amber light that’s stays on and it will not connect to the internet.
I can hear the disk spin too.
I purchased an external SATA case to pull the data off the disk. Is the only resort I have is using a Linux computer to download my files off the hard drive? I really need these files any help, recommendations or advice is greatly appreciated!
I have a WDMycloud which I have not used for years, although it has been connected to the network. I used it to backup wedding photos.
Recently a client came to me who had lost their photos from their wedding back in 2016 some 8 years ago. I tried to access the WDMy Cloud however like many of you it had the Orange Amber Light permanently on.
Rebooting did noting
Pressing reset for however long did nothing
No amount of cable swopping worked. network or power cable that is.
So I took the drive out and inserted it into an external docking station. it would not initialise so I used external disk manager Disk Drill. This could see the drive however did not recover the files in a way that was usable. I.e. it renamed them and had them in a random order.
I then came across the Paragon software, which once downloaded and installed on my MacBook Pro enabled me to read EXT4 which is the file format used my the WD My Cloud.
This showed that the drive had lost volumes. I have no idea why, however it was able to fix them.
I then put the drive backing the case of the wd My could and booted it up.
the solid orange liege still came up so I pressed the reset button. This time the orange light flickered.
I left it for about 10 mins and it then turned blue.
In short all my files have been restored and I have full access again.
Note that the single bay/single drive My Cloud data partition is formatted for EXT4. As you discovered one can use Paragon’s software OR one can use a Linux distro boot disk/flash drive or various other programs to read the extracted My Cloud hard drive’s EXT4 data partition.
