This process can be used to recover bricked device
or just to upgrade to larger disk drive
About 8 months after I bough my 4TB WD My Cloud NAS drive it
decided that it did not wanted to provide access to any of the
shares nor let me into the console. After a very lengthy call
with WD support they had it replaced after trying to extort
money for the replacement unit while it was still under
warranty. The drive run fine ever since. I was slowly starting
to run out of space on the device and as I wanted to keep power
consumption to minimal and I was on a kick of shrinking my
servers in the rack I had virtualized all of my servers leaving
me with just with a single host and about 10 to 14 VM running
inside of it at any one time. With the shrinkage of physical
servers and no place to put my extra files on I decided to by
another 4TB NAS drive. The new drive also gave me the
possibility of splitting my data/files so that I would have my
media / pictures / personal / etc ... files on one drive and
other stuff like tools I use and just random apps on another
drive. The new drive had been running for some time again,
however this time it passed warranty period. where again it just
stopped responding and after restarting it just did not wanted
to boot and had this infamous white light ON and just did not
wanted to boot up. I'm not an a.... cause as some people
would have called WD and start complaining about till they got
it their way. But... Not sure exactly how many times I tied to
power down and boot up. I even tried soft and eventually hard
reset to it just did not wanted to recover so I just left it
alone as it did not had anything i could not get back from other
machines and got my self a 4 bay NAS device capable of
RAID 5 so that if a drive fails it would still run on the CRC
checksum. I slapped a 1TB drive that I had lying around and
really never expanded it to full 16GB RAID 5 setup. One day as
the 1Tb drive started filling up again I decided to turn the 4TB
drive back on to see what would happen miraculously it booted
up. Surprisingly I did not lost anything from it and kept on
using it as nothing had happened. They run for another year
where the second drive crapped out again, this time the drive
was full of stuff, defaulting the drive to factory and possibly
loosing everything was not an option.
Not wanting to loose anything and as the drive was out of
warranty decided to open up the case and see if I could copy
data from it. First thing I tried was to hook it up to my
windows machine Unfortunetaly it did not wanted to read the
drive and prompted to format it. Well that definetaly as not a
good first sign. After some quick search, I had found out that
the My Cloud devices are running Linux.... thou how obvious. Out
came the Windows OS disk and came Linux disk. Boot it up and
whaaa laaa. there's my data in all of it glory. Quickly
turned on one of my servers with enough disk space and ported
the data to it.
Now what, have the data back, preassure of possibility loosing
it is gone but its on a physical server that is loud and running
2Amps (240w) of power...... not very power efficient as the tiny
NAS running on only 16w.
After fruitless restarts and trying to restore to factory OS
defaults she still does not want to boot. At a loss and not
making progress, decided to take off to the wealth of
information on internet.
Found couple of good solutions to the problem but all really
evolved around re-imaging the drive with fresh OS. One cool idea
was to take currently running device and take OS snapshot and
save it to local share. One cavit is to default the OS to
factory. Other option is to find "virgin" copy of the OS that
could be used as source and applied to the drive. After numerous
downloads of the OS images and all being corrupted and just not
having much of a luck getting the drive running decided to get a
copy of OS from still running drive. However decided to skip on
defaulting the OS to factory trying to avoid of possibly messing
up the running drive and just for the sake of reinitializing it
backup.
After making a backup of my running drive (without resetting to
factory) I managed to restore the bricked device but for some
reason it has just sluggish and was pausing randomly or just
dropping connections. So off I whent back on a hunt of "virgin"
OS images. After some time searching I had found couple "virgin"
images of 2 and 3 TB devices. I never tried the 3TB and just
used 2TB image and it worked perfectly fine. One thing I had to
do was to resize the data partition 4 from 2 to 4TB well
actually 6TB as I decided to get a larger drive as I had bought
it for the 4bay device but never used. The fact that the 6TB
drive is SATA III which really does not matter but the fact that
it has larger buffer size, the overall performance is much
faster. Also the drive runs cooler then the 4TB drive which is
additional bonus.
Maybe at some point I'll try upgrading the first NAS to 8TB if I
have nothing better to do or just want to waste $300 for new
drive.
So if you like to make a backup of your current My Cloud OS and
partition table you will need to do following and you don't even
need to open the drive up.
1. Boot up
your MyCloud
device log
into it and
make sure
SSH is
enabled.
Once you
confirmed
that its on
you can
logout from
it.
2.
Login to the
drive using
PuTTY
(Windows) or
Terminal on
(OSX) or
terminal on
your Linux
machine.
Type
this
command
to reset
the
firmware
to a
factory
state,
this
will
give you
standard
WD
defaults
as per
brand
new out
of box
experiance
and you
will not
have to
guess on
passwords,
IP of
the
device
or
change
name or
anything
that was
custom
set.
/usr/local/sbin/factoryRestore.sh noreformat
Following
command
will
backup
OS all
of the
OS
partitions
etc
minus
any data
on data
partition
4. This
assumes
you have
share
name
called
Public
or you
can
change
public
to any
share
thats
you have
setup on
your
device
dd if=/dev/sda of=/DataVolume/shares/Public/mycloud.img bs=1M count=5000
After about 5 minutes you will have a virgin Image of
your OS and partitions, you can move it somewhere else for
safe keeping if at any time you need to restore your device.
Below table is sample of 6TB hard drive partition table.
Please do not take it as the defacto for yours as you may
have drive with different geomertry due to different brand
or type.
Now to restore image to the drive, the drive will need to be
physically connected to a PC via either USB adapter or to SATA
port. So if you are trying to recover your original drive you
have no choice but to open up the case. Its very simple and if
you are carefull not like me and with a bit of patiance
you will not break any locking tabs on the case. The case has 4
small tabs that hold the outer shell (sides and front) to the
edges (top, back and bottom). You can insert a small flat blade
on top front and you can crak open the case and gently loosen
remaining tabsand slide the case off. Or if you have strong
finger dexterity, hold top and bottom back corners of the case
and push on back center of the case, the back panel will bow in
and while its doing it will release the tabs and again you can
slide cover from the device.
Once the cover is removed you can gently lift front of the drive
and it will slide out of the frame. The drive will have a
controller bolted to it with 3 screws covered with kapton take
as security device. You either rip the tape off and remove the
screws or put the drive back together if you dont want to void
warranty.
once you remove the screws and unplug the controller you can
either plug it to SATA port on PC or use USB adapter.
mycloud 2TB v03.00.03-413
virgin image
If you are running Linux you have all tools that are required
If you are running Windows you will need DD tool to apply image
to the drive and possibly 7zip to extract the image if you
downloaded from here. GPART or other partitioning utility
if you want to expand the data partition.
Or you can download System Rescue CD, burn it to CD or USB
drive.
You will also need a USB flash drive if you are booting of CD
If you downloaded image from here you will need a minimal 4Gb
USB flash drive to hold the image. If you plan of booting
from USB drive make sure the flash drive is big enough to hold
your OS and the image.
Assuming you are using CD to boot with SystemRescueCD and
flash drive. I would also suject that if you have any other hard
drives in the system you may want to disconnect them at this
time so that you only have the singe hard drive for your NAS
device.
1. format flash drive with NTFS partition on your Windows PC and
extract image from the compressed file or if you have your own
copied it into it
2. with destination hard drive plugged into PC put the CD in and
plug in USB flash drive.
3. Bring boot menu up and boot from CD
4. From system rescue CD boot into graphical option. you may see
some errors while its booting, you can just ignore them at this
time.
5. verify that you can see the hard drive. if you only have the
single hard drive it will be mounted as /dev/sda
6. Within terminal window mount the USB flash drive with
following commands
mkdir /mnt/usb
mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb
Do a listing of the USB drive to make sure you
can see the image file
umount /dev/sda
dd if=/mnt/usb/mycloud.img of=/dev/sda bs=1M
8. You can now shut down the system by entering shutdown -h now
command and trying the new drive after plugging in the
controller onto the drive and see if you can get the blue light.
or you can simply skip the extra step and just extend partition
to its maximum. If you just want to extend the partition start
gpart select sda4 partition and extend it to maximum and apply
changes. For some reason that did not worked for me and I
had to delete the partition and create a new one. One thing to
watch for is to make sure its formated as ext4.
You can now assemble everything back together and enjoy the
fact that you recovered your NAS.
NOTE: One thing to keep in mind is that image from this site
had old v3x firmware version, Your device might automatically
upgrade it self to latest version once it reaches WD site.
.
