Can't find files : restoring MBL via external SATA dock

WD Legacy Products My Book Live
1

Hi - after a move across country my MBL wasn’t accessible on my network. I could hear the drive spinning but nothing I did got it visible on my network. Using this thread ([GUIDE] How to unbrick a totally dead MBL) I’ve gotten the 2TB drive removed from the MBL case, and I purchased an SATA dock. I’ve also got Disk Internals Linux Reader installed on my windows machine.

So… the drive is visible, although it’s a bit strange how many volumes it presents. I can see:
Linux Ext Volume 1 and
Linux Ext Volume 2
plus two NTFS Volumes
NTFS Volume 1 (SYSTEM_DRV) and
NTFS Volume 2 (SYSTEM_DRV)

I’m actually quite familiar with Linux - and all 4 of the above appear to just be a vanilla Linux distribution. I cannot see any obvious places where all my photos and other files reside - I actually drilled down into all the folders and I simply can’t see where my user data is located. It’s possible in all the subdirectories I missed some singular directory that contains everything - if so I must have missed it.

Where is my user data located or is something else not right?

Thanks in advance.

2

You should see an EXT3/4 partition that’s just shy of 2TB. That’s the data partition.
Not sure why you’re seeing NTFS partitions, there shouldn’t be any of those.

If I recall correctly, the data partition is #4.

3

Ah… I did find /CacheVolume and there’s all my files. Thanks very much to everyone on this forum, saving the pictures of my daughters from when they were younger is invaluable.

4

I’d like to add one more inquiry: during recovery I’m consistently running into “Waiting for preview. (Preview not responding)” During this time there is no copying of files and as a result overall copy speeds end up in the toilet. 0.1MB/sec or worse. Googling this issue doesn’t seem to turn up any suggestions… is there a fix?

5

Are you trying to debrick the drive, or just trying to get the files off of it?

If the latter, what exactly is giving you that “Preview” issue? That doesn’t sound like a simple file copy thing.

6

I’m just trying to get files off of it. I receive the “waiting for preview” dialog box when copying and also just drilling down into different file folders… I realize this may be more of a diskinternals software issue but was hoping there may be an easy fix.
Thank you

7

I know nothing of Disk Internals.

Here’s my suggestion: Go download an Ubuntu Live distro and have it boot from a USB drive.

Mount the HDD CacheVolume partition from the Linux Disk manager.

Get your files.