I had my My Cloud EX2 Ultra go down a few days ago and when I checked the device it showed a solid red light. I tried to recover the data but the drive was encrypted (downloaded numerous linux file system explorers and booted ubuntu as well showing the encryption). I was unable to access the dashboard since the drive was non-functioning. I tried the 4 sec reset and eventually the 40 sec reset. Nothing seemed to work. I have tried accessing SSH but that was never enabled, still won’t work even after the 40 sec reset.
Now I am pretty sure I’ve backed myself into a corner. Following the numerous topics I could find, it was stated that if you delete all partitions on a disk then the My Cloud EX2 Ultra will recognize it and format the drive accordingly. I did this and that didn’t work. I tried formatting to NTFS (saw some article about this being able to be recognized using paragon software??) and this hasn’t worked.
I have a hard reset My Cloud EX2 Ultra, with a NTFS formatted WD Red 8TB drive that will not show up as anything other than solid red LED light (no drive) and states to insert drive on setup. Occasionally there is no LED like the My Cloud does not recognize the drive.
What can I do to get this $200+ drive working again? I’ve already lost the data despite my best efforts to save it, don’t want to lose the entire drive.
I will caveat this by stating I am not an expert in this area, however I am currently in the process of working to recover data from a friends laptop drive … it wasnt encrypted though.
The utilities I have used so far (been working on this for a couple of weeks): I have done all this via my Raspberry Pi using MobaXterm to access it via SSH only. This was so I could just leave it running without any impact on my main PC, and in addition to that my RPi has a mapped drive to my NAS so I could easily copy data to the NAS as a backup.
Using this I managed to access the primary partition on the drive (couldnt mount it or access it via Linux or Windows otherwise). I could read down to files and folders and copy them off the drive.
Can also be used to identify and recover deleted partitions etc, lots of information about this online. I had never heard of it before.
I didnt use this myself but came highly recommended. It is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from hard disks, CD-ROMs, and lost pictures (thus the Photo Recovery name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media’s file system has been severely damaged or reformatted.
I am currently running this on the drive to try and get an image file that I can then mount and interrogate (probably should have run this first really). It has taken taken 6+ days so far (500Gb drive) and is currently at 99.63% recovered.
Have a look at some of these, might help but I have no idea how good they might be if the drive was encrypted. A the drive I am working on isn’t, it’s not something I investigated.
Thank you for these suggestions, I will have to try them. I am currently doing a 3 day Extended Test with WD Data LifeGuard. I cannot access the device by SSH, so that is not an option. I have deleted all the partitions already, so the drive has no data on it currently. I am unsure of what image to mount to the drive to get it to work. I saw a thread about a 2 TB drive image, but I have not tried that yet.
If you cant directly access the drive through the NAS, it might be worth taking it out and using a SATA > USB converter cable and plugging it directly into a PC or similar. That is what I did with the one I am working on through my RPi.
The cable I bought cost £8 from Amazon:
TestDisk is available for Windows but I have only used it via the Raspberry Pi, I did it that way for ease and so it didnt tie up my machine. I am not a Linux expert by any stretch of the imagination, I have only really been using it for a couple of months, so everything I have done has been via guides online and advise from friends / colleague with more technical knowhow than me.
I have a HDD dock that connects via USB and I was able to read the disk, but not access any files on it as it was encrypted (I guess because of RAID setting). I deleted partitions using Windows Disk Management and did a “fomat” using the WD Data LifeGuard tool. I am unclear if the drive is the problem or the My Cloud EX2 Ultra device becauase while the drive actually passes diagnostics and SMART status, it does not get read by the My Cloud, it remains a solid red LED. The device works, its not dead but I cannot get past the Insert Hard Drive screen (see attached picture). I cannot SSH into the device itself (My Cloud EX2 Ultra) and I am unclear why. I did a 40 sec reset, which seems to not specify if SSH is disabled, but it was never enabled to my knowledge in the first place.
