Hi,
I’ve just bought a My Passport Wireless Pro to daily backup my camera SD card and I was really disappointed that the box was just unable to access none of my SD cards nor my camera through the USB cable.
Hopefully, it appears it runs a small embedded linux system and that most of operations are driven by some shell scripts (mainly located under /sbin).
I’ve eventually found the root cause, all scripts are failing because of unexpected content in the /etc/timezone_offset file. For instance mine contains:
2,0
This might be due to my locale settings on my laptop and on my phone, as in France the decimal point is a comma “,” instead of default US dot “.”.
The real fix would be to change the way the file is written (according to the doc the timezone is updated when you log on the web interface or on the mobile app) but I didn’t immediately find where it was done.
So, Here is a quick howto to fix these scripts:
First enable ssh in the web interface
Login through ssh from a terminal in your host pc
ssh root@mypassport.local
Inside the root shell, type the following commands:
$ cd /sbin
List the files to fix:
$ grep -l timezone_offset *.sh
SDCard_StorageTransfer.sh
USB_StorageTransfer.sh
automount.sh
mtpmount.sh
sdmount.sh
Fix the files:
$ sed -i -e 's#`cat /etc/timezone_offset`#`cat /etc/timezone_offset | tr , .`#g' *.sh
Check that the changes have been correctly applied:
$ grep timezone_offset *.sh
SDCard_StorageTransfer.sh:timeoffset=`cat /etc/timezone_offset | tr , .`
USB_StorageTransfer.sh:timeoffset=`cat /etc/timezone_offset | tr , .`
automount.sh: timeoffset=`cat /etc/timezone_offset | tr , .`
mtpmount.sh: timeoffset=`cat /etc/timezone_offset | tr , .`
mtpmount.sh: timeoffset=`cat /etc/timezone_offset | tr , .`
sdmount.sh: timeoffset=`cat /etc/timezone_offset | tr , .`
You’re done, now:
$ exit
Now SD Cards and my camera are automatically detected and mounted upon insertion. Auto backups work like a charm !
It would be nice if WD would release a firmware update to fix this, in the mean time I hope this quick hack would help you as much as me. It would be rather easy to create a custom firmware .bin file (it’s just a tar file containing a rootfs tar, so changing it is straightforward) but I’m lacking time to do it.
