Airport time capsule 1st gen flashing orange light

It is a major miracle that a 1st Gen Time Capsule will even power on at all at this point. It should have died long ago.

As a last ditch effort, try a Hard Reset on the Time Capsule and see if you can set it up again. If you can, and you have data that you do not want to lose on the Time Capsule, copy that data over to another drive as soon as possible.

How to reset your AirPort base station - Apple Supportsupport.apple.com › en-us

You have to get the Time Capsule back up and running first.......to get at the data.

The reset will not affect any of the data on the Time Capsule......assuming the Time Capsule is still OK.

If you can't get the Time Capsule working again, you'll have to physically open up the Time Capsule to pull the hard drive out. Let's hope that the flashing light problem is not telling you that the hard drive has failed.

when I get a misbehaving apple router which will not play nice with the airport util then I take a computer and disable it's wifi if it has that, and connect it directly to the router by ethernet cable, then airport util always been able to find it so far, and airport util been able to give me a more meaningful error message than an unexpected error occured

Rather than trying to restore previous settings.....which may be faulty.......try setting up the Time Capsule with new settings for the Network Name, Base Station Name, and Password.

If the Time Capsule is working correctly, you will have a new wireless network, so you will need to choose the name of the network and then enter the password on devices that will be connecting to the network.