I found my MBWE to be powered off and I couldn't power it back on: after holding the power button for some seconds, I could hear the disk trying to spin very faintly and the blue lights were not turning on. ( It has been almost always turned on since I bought it ~5 yrs ago, but I'm not using it too often to know what caused it to shutdown)
Anyway, I removed the disk and placed it in my linux box to recover the data before messin with the device. All data were intact and I could copy them to a safe place after mounting the 4th partition (eg mount -t ext3 /dev/sdc4 /mnt).
Since the HDD seemed to be working ok, I placed it back and first tried to do a 'factory' reset holding the reset button, while plugging in the power and then the ethernet cable (read it swh else), it made no difference.
With a voltage tester I verified that the power adapter was working ok (steady 12V), but the power cables going to the SATA drive did not receive power (i think only 0.3V in one pair of the cables, out of the 4 ), so I assume that an electronic part in-between has failed.
I went on to power the SATA drive from an extra SATA power cable from my PC while having a data cable attached to the motherboard of the MBWE. Then I pressed the button and voila the device booted up successfuly, I could also connect via the network!
I know its not the ideal solution, but it may help someone to access the data again without using any linux knowledge; I hope to find a sleeker way to power the disk from the 12V input coming from its own adapter rather than having to keep it connected with the PC.
Maybe someone can share any tips on how to find/replace the broken part? Im not so familiar with electronics, but I could order a part and solder it on the board, if its not in the nanoscale 
Thanks!
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