Lost all directories on MBL

Connected my MBL directly to my Macbook Pro in order to transfer files quicker to the drive and in the finder window the drive showed however said connection failed on guest and user profiles.

Have soft reset the drive and also tried it on my other Mac.

Managed to access the dashboard and it showing 2gb used out of 2tb which was alarming. Tried to run the diagnostic features however they all fail. The status bar at the bottom of the dashboard giving a graphical view of the capacity used shows it 2/3rds full with ā€˜otherā€™ files as the colour code so the files are there however not accesible.

Looks like I need to ā€˜rescueā€™ the data or have the file/directory structure rebuilt.

Any ideas appreciated!

Thanks

J

If you have not enabled SSH yet go ahead and do it. There are some Linux gurus out here that might be able to help you out if all else fails. But they will need this enabled.

Go to the UI and change the browser path from

http://mybooklive/UI/#

to

http://mybooklive/UI/ssh

and click to enable SSH.

A couple questions:

  1. What firmware version is the drive. From the UI go to Settings, then Updates (or Firmware). It is on the main Settings page.

  2. Have you run a Time Machine Backup? That will show up as ā€œotherā€.

Thanks. Will make the change.

Dont think I have done a FW update since late last year. I know there is a new one out however was hesitant to make too many changes at the moment. The drive was working OK last week so am comfortable that is not the issue however stranger things have prevailed as we all know!

I dont use it for TM backup so thats in the clear also.

Thanks

hmm, the very first sentence is bad news. You cannot connect a NAS to a PC and expect it to work as it was when connected to the router. Unless you are an advance user and did not feel the need to provide all details

Did you do anything else, network related besides connecting it to the Mac? I am not referring to dashboard and open mounts or anything else. And yes, it is a trick question. If you do not know the answer, connect it back to the router and see if all is ok.

Also, connecting it directly to PC might not make it faster, it all depends if you have a gig devices all the way around

edited/added: My $02, connect both devices to router, at least Ā for the first large transfer.

I believe that Spanner connected an Ethernet cable directly from the drive to the Mac. This should work fineā€¦ but I guess there could be some IP issues. I am not familiar with Macā€™s protocols.

Spanner, with the Live hooked up to the Mac open a Terminal (from Mac).

type:

ssh root@mybooklive.local

Password = welc0me

now from the command prompt type:

df -h

Post the results please.

Evening All,

Yes for clarity the drive is plugged in to the ethernet port of my Mac which has not been an issue until now.

I plugged it back in to the router however could so no more or no less than I have done currently.

Chaos 311 please see the below:

ssh: connect to host mybooklive.local port 22: Connection refused

I am at the stage where the data on the drive is of more value than the continued use of the drive for its orignal purpose. Is there an easy way to force the data through a rebuild or repaid directly in a SATA port?

Thanks all,

James

if you connect to the mac port, yes there will be IP issues and will not work. In the event it might, and IF, would be becuase both interfaces timed out looking for a DHCP servers and will go to a 169.254.0.0/16 range. But like I said, 99% of the time will not work.

Think about it. if the MBL and the Mac Nic are set to DCHP, how in the world will they get an IP if you connect them to each other?Ā :stuck_out_tongue:

Only way to get it to communicate, it either a DHCP server set on the MAC, or both devices on static IPs.

And it is not about MAC protocols, this is about TCP/IP and networking.

Take a look at this thread. Someone else has posted a guide to recovering data via Sata

http://community.wd.com/t5/My-Book-Live/My-Book-Live-contents-disappeared/m-p/573732#M23081Ā 

To find the issue is very simpleā€¦ connect it to the router and see if it is all ok.

If it is not, then yes, you might have to recover your data by following the link provided, even though there is a new one, called V2. Search for it.

Thanks for the feedback. It is appreciated.

The IP listed was something along the guise of what Shabuboy has indicated and is currently listed as 169.254.70.20

I have actually been succesfully using the MBL as a psudo external drive for months now with no issues. The dashboard is showing the data as there but as ā€˜otherā€™ in classification, i.e not listed as music, video or photo which is what the dashboard would register as a file type. It is basically unmounted data which explains the loss of the directory structure as a share. All this is in the public shares and not a user accessed share.

Connected to the router and get exactly the same error as connected to the mac directly. Connection failed whether I conect as a guest or indeed my username, which is now not registered as soft reset the drive. The setup either through the web portal nor downloaded .dmg wont run and stalls at the first hurdle and diagnostics wont work. This is simply a directory structure collapse. The system recognises the drive but there is no structure for it to engage with. This is what I would need to recover I suspect.

Question is, can i recover through a 3rd party program or do I have to plug in the drive to SATA and try and force read which am happy to do however but will it actually work based on the above. WD support as yet has still not come back to me.

Thanks for the input though. Most useful.

http://community.wd.com/t5/My-Book-Live/GUIDE-How-to-unbrick-a-totally-dead-MBL/td-p/435724

Just an update running the setup again. Get the following:

There was a problem connecting to the server ā€œ169.254.7.20ā€.

The share does not exist on the server. Please check the share name, and then try again.

Like I said, just letting the DHCP time out, lots of unexpected issues you will see. It will work sometimes, sometimes it will not, sometimes it might try to reach the DCHP server, sometimes you might get a different IP, I could go on and onā€¦ There is just no control over it.

Just did the same on the router and then again got the same error with the IP assigned by DCHP on the router which is 192.168.0.8

It is coming up as failed as mounting the shared folders which is what I suspected.

Over this! Want my files!

Managed to get to 90% on a diagnostic! That is progress. Tried to run and update through the dashboard and was told there was not enough space so assuming this is bacuase of the mounting.

Is there an error in your dashboard saying ā€œThe datavolume failed to mountā€ by chance? It would be listed under the dashboard alerts

Yes. The first time it has shown with a recent time stamp.

Think it is now all but confirmed. What I do now I hand over to the community!

Please hold

Please try this to fix the datavolume filesystem

http://community.wd.com/t5/My-Book-Live/Data-Volumes-failed-to-Mount/m-p/556170#M20534

Ok. Thanks.

Tried the below and got the following:

MyBookLive:~# fsck /dev/sda4
fsck from util-linux-ng 2.17.2
e2fsck 1.41.12 (17-May-2010)
fsck.ext2: Superblock invalid, trying backup blocksā€¦
fsck.ext2: Bad magic number in super-block while trying to open /dev/sda4

The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2
filesystem. If the device is valid and it really contains an ext2
filesystem (and not swap or ufs or something else), then the superblock
is corrupt, and you might try running e2fsck with an alternate superblock:
e2fsck -b 8193

I can run the putty program through Parallels windows if you think that may also work?