Corrupt MBL - Please Help!

WD Legacy Products My Book Live
1

I pretty much leave my MBL to its own devices and use it to store files for access from all our gadgets.  It occassionally fell off the network and was tad busy disk-wise but generally behaved itself.

Until something happened a few days ago.

Couldn’t get into it and it showed up as a mysterious device on the My Cloud app.

So attached it to PC and SSH’d into it for the first time.  Eventually realised the /DataVolume wasn’t mounted.  It mounts with a mount command and I can see my shares.  However, it won’t mount on a reboot and I get the “Initializing device…” message.

All the usual manual firmware upgrade fixes seem to fail with the same issue - when any of the scripts run I get a shower of messages saying “/etc/system.conf: line nnn: xxx: command not found” where nnn is a line number and xxx another number.  I was expecting /etc/system.conf to be a text file but it’s a mess of odd characters as per a binary file?  Is it corrupt?

How can I sort this file out if I can’t run any of the .sh scripts to to do restores/updates?  That’s assuming it’s the culprit, of course - if it is, would a vanilla system.conf solve it (from latest firmware) and how on earth do I get one?

I’m familiar with UNIX, and thereby Linux, so I can get around and issue commands but I won’t modify anything for fear of making things worse.  The partitions seem to be OK.

Any suggestions most welcome - I don’t think it’s terminal (there must be a joke there somewhere…).

2

Hello there,

Sorry to hear that you are experiencing issues with your unit.

See if the following link helps

http://community.wd.com/t5/My-Book-Live/GUIDE-Debrick-MyBookLive-v2-0/m-p/567582#M22126

3

Before you do anything, if possible, backup your data

If under Warranty, try to get a replacement.

Otherwise, look for Nfodiz guides for Unbrink, there are two versions.

Good luck!

4

Thanks both.  I really don’t want to take it apart and the de-bricking guides don’t work as my /etc/system.conf is corrupt so the .sh scripts can’t run it and hence fail.  I’ve checked around and everything else seems fine.  I was hoping just restoring a healthy /etc/system.conf file may help?  If someone could post a default one I’ll give it a bash (there’s another bad Linux joke…)

5

If you do not want to take it apart, fair enough.

??? about the second part… the de-bricking will NOT make use of your conf file, or any file for that matter.

It will restore the original files and configs. You might even be able to get it from those files, as some are tar and img.

6

What I was referring to was that updateFirmwareFromFile.sh, amongst others, performs a “. /etc/system.conf” or reference that file.  

I am looking at getting it from rootfs.img - is this popsicle if I write that image to a SD card or similar?  Alternatively, I was hoping the system.conf was fairly generic for the MBL (1TB) so getting one from another owner may do the trick, even if I need to edit it…

7

Eureka!

I’ve revived it after much experimenting & a bit of reading…

In case it’s useful to others, here’s what I did:

1.  Enabled SSH

2.  Realised /etc/system.conf was bad after running the usual recovery/restore scripts

3.  As I could mount data volume manually and everything else looked sound, decided to replace system.conf rather than de-brick (posted here at this stage)

4.  Hmmm…

5.  Extracted rootfs.img from updateFile.deb and transferred to PC using SFTP

6.  Wrote to external USB drive using Roadkil’s Disk Image (on Windows)

7.  Hmmm…

8.  Used ext2fsd to see my EXT3 root partition created on USB drive (on Windows)

9.  Transferred system.conf to MBL using SFTP

10.  Rebooted - Green LED!

I’m a bit of a Linux newbie so this may not be conventional - luckily I had some UNIX knowledge (mostly from developer perspective) and I’m a stubborn and persistent git!  :smiley:

It all came up OK I can access my files - just had to set up things again (users, network settings etc.).

The useful bit is I have the whole root partition on my pen drive and can access out-of-the-box files if anything else is duff.  Obviously, I’d need to be careful about files I overwrite.

This may not help in a lot of cases but it proves that some things can be done without having to rip the drive out - I really didn’t fancy that.

Not sure why system.conf got corrupted but it coincided with me disabling Twonky via the UI a few days back - there seems to be a lot of pain about switching or disabling the media server?

I’ve learnt a lot from this experience and hope some of the techniques/tools used may help others in some way if they require a similar approach.

Happy days!