Resetting Apple Time Capsule with Blinking Amber Light

I’ve been playing with a 500GB Apple Time Capsule. I had often thought of these devices as a bit of a joke, very expensive (as usual for Apple) and why only give it a single hard drive? Why not two and then you could setup RAID-1? Typical Apple compromises, form over function, etc.

However, in use these are rather nice products. They look nice and discrete, and have a lovely user interface (although it’s a shame you can’t access the interface via a web browser). Maybe one drive is enough for the normal user who possibly never even did any backups before this.

I’ll report back after more use…

However, when I first got my hands on this used model it was completely unresponsive, just flashing its amber light slowly. A bit of digging on the net revealed that it was probably best to reset it and here’s how:

Turn the device on and wait a minute. Hold in the reset button at the back with something small and pointy for about 5 seconds until the front light flashes quickly. Then give the device time to reboot. This should return it to factory default settings but, crucially, shouldn’t delete any data stored on the hard drive. Apparently if this doesn’t work you do the same but turn the power off and turn it on whilst holding in the reset button for a similar amount of time – not sure if this also preserves data on the hard drive.

Comments

Anonymous said…

thanks, but my machine doesn't work either.. I have been waiting in 2 hours after reset process.

26 September 2010 at 09:49

Anonymous said…

thanks, but my machine doesn't work either.. I have been waiting in 2 hours after reset process.

26 September 2010 at 09:49

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