Chosen Solution
I inherited a Maxtor Shared Storage II NAS. After sitting unused for some months, it now won’t work; the drive makes a clicking noise periodically (I know that’s not good), plus the power status light on the front blinks freen, continuously and rapidly, which from some googling indicates failure. I tried the reset, no joy. Not visible on network. Question is: should I just junk it, or will replacing the drives possibly fix it? I don’t even know where the OS is stored–in firmware, or on the drives?–and don’t want to spend a lot of time on it myself. If there’s a chance it’s just the drive, I’ll yank the drives out (it’s my client’s data) and sell the enclosure to someone who cares to fiddle with it. I did find lots and lots of posts online about these failing, but a lot of them had to do with the Seagate drives inside, which may have fallen victim to the firmware bug last year.
I would first remove the internal drive mechanisms (isn’t this a dual drive unit?) and test them the clicking sound doesn’t sound promising, that’s likely a drive about to go. but I’ve also seen several external drive enclosures with dead interface logic, meanwhile the internal drive was fine. anyhow if this is a dual drive unit, then perhaps you can at least salvage one drive and reuse in another external enclosure.
