plugout.net

Lacie cloudbox hard drive died. It would boot and the blue led was flashing quickly. Not the slow blue flashing you see on some youtube videos. Anyway. I replaced the internal hard drive with a spare sata seagate barracuda.

Attempted to boot the drive again with the same result. The cloudbox would not dhcp and come online with a replaced drive or the dead drive. Googled around and found the Lacie network assistant software for windows as well as the "CloudBox_2.6.10.2.capsule" file that lacie network assistant LNA uses for recovery.

I ran the recovery thinking wham bam this tool is the real deal and will bring it back to life. but nope. quick blue flashing led after it rebooted its self.

So the LNA tool managed to find the drive even though it was not appearing on my network. Very interesting I thought.
I ran the tool again with cmd open this time I did an arp -a when the LNA says it found the drive and was attempting to recover. I saw that it pulled an ip and was now pingable. Still the nas drive was flashing blue and would reboot automatically when the LNA recovery would fail.

Googled more and came across plugout and fvdw-sl. Followed the steps for loading the firmware within the fvdw-sl-console. Very functional tool but still required a lot of reading on this forum as well as disabling firewalls isolating the nas and laptop on a switch etc.

Does LNA require an originally formatted lacie drive to function? what is the point of that?
I'm glad these resources existed as it saved yet another piece of tech designed to rot in a landfill after a year.

Does LNA require an originally formatted lacie drive to function? what is the point of that?

I do not know to be honest, never used this lacie assistant ;) I use fvdw-sl
But I might need a partition table set up in the way that the lacie firmware can be installed.
ps The cloudbox has a special setup with respect to partition table deviating from earlier models.

So the LNA tool managed to find the drive even though it was not appearing on my network

What do you mean with that ? that it found it after you stated it ?
It could mean that the bootloader of the cloudbox responded to the LNA (similar tool as fvdw-sl console) and interupted boot and tries to upload the capsule, but I doubt if the bootloader has the capability to install the firmware. I rather would think that the boot script of the lacie firmware has a special mode when booting to detect the assistant and interrupt boots to upload the recovery file.
But on a new disk nothing is present, so I might be wrong

ps a fast blinking blue led means that the boot script is hanging (so not necessarily that your disk is dead)

So the LNA tool managed to find the drive even though it was not appearing on my network

What do you mean with that ? that it found it after you stated it ?
It could mean that the bootloader of the cloudbox responded to the LNA (similar tool as fvdw-sl console) and interupted boot and tries to upload the capsule, but I doubt if the bootloader has the capability to install the firmware. I rather would think that the boot script of the lacie firmware has a special mode when booting to detect the assistant and interrupt boots to upload the recovery file.
But on a new disk nothing is present, so I might be wrong

ps a fast blinking blue led means that the boot script is hanging (so not necessarily that your disk is dead)

Before coming across fvdw-sl and playing with LNA I was scanning my local network for devices. I couldn't find the cloudbox's mac address which was labeled on the sticker inside.
With the lacie drive powered on quick flashing the blue led.
The LNA, like you said must interrupt something because the recovery would load.
moment later it would state that it found the drive
then when attempting the recovery the led would flash red one time
the drive would reboot going back to a quick flashing blue.
LNA recovery would time out and fail (the drive once again not appearing on the network).

So tinkering a bit I ran LNA waited for it to find the drive ran arp -a and saw the mac address associated to an ip on my network. I then halted the LNA and its sftp program, so it wouldn't attempt to recover and reboot the drive. The drive remained on my network with a pingable IP but i couldn't find any services running on that IP. At that point I thought I figured out some way to get it to boot into its recovery mode that I couldn't access.

So yeah what you are saying sounds right. The drive had a failed boot script, as well as a failed hard drive. The original drives heads were crashing so that was an obvious sound.
Swapping the hard drive then utilizing fvdw-sl resolved this.