LS210D has red light 7X meaning firmware corruption

[rider89]

about 6 weeks ago, I updated firmware to 173 and the unit worked OK, accessed it the usual ways to test.  Left it running, but otherwise didn't access it for a week or so.   Now it flashes red 7X which shows in the manual as corrupted firmware.   I've downloaded a 174 firmware file.  Can't access through the LAN, so is there a way to load it via the USB port on the LS210 ?   Or do I need to do something else to get it running again ?   Using Windows PC's.

[1000001101000]

From the various experiments I've done with these devices it seems that:
6x blinks - The device can read the drive and find the boot partition but fails to load boot files from it
7x blinks - The device either cannot read the drive or cannot access the boot partition

This could very well mean the drive is failing.

If you want you can attempt to re-install the firmware with the device as is you can find information about what is required in this post:
http://forums.buffalotech.com/index.php?topic=30419.0

Your other options all involve opening up the device and connecting the drive to a PC. I have some notes/pictures of disassembling it here:
https://buffalonas.miraheze.org/wiki/Linkstation_LS210D#Disassembly

From there you could run some diagnostics to determine the health of the drive and try to recover data if it's still working.