Dead WD My Cloud - Hard Drive not read

[Mahmoud_Tarief]

Hi,

My WD My Cloud suddenly got dead (blinking purple) and no network or anything is working. After opening a ticket the support said I’m in a country that they don’t cover and I need to return the device from where I bought. They advised that the purple color means something went wrong when the device was updating (although this is not correct & solid purple is different than blinking purple).

Anyways, I opened the My Cloud case and got a SATA to USB connection and connected that drive to my laptop (the SATA to USB has 2 USB ends - I guess one for data and one for power) however the drive is not detected at all on my windows laptop. I have the Linux Reader software that reads the EXT2/3 drives but still no luck.

Is the SATA to USB defected or is the Hard Drive defected or what might be the issue? Am I missing anything?

The drive contains all my work and I really need to recover it.

Thanks a lot for the great community.

[cpt_paranoia]

My usual recovery suggestion can be found here:

My Cloud dead, how to see content on Windows 10?

Hi! I don’t really know if this is the place to post this, but I would really really need some help. So one day I woke up and realized that my My Cloud 3 TB was glowing all red in the front. I didn’t think that is was such a big deal, however after trying to get it to connect through Wifi several times (for about 6 hours), I couldn’t get it working. I was so frustrated. My whole life is on the My Cloud. What I did notice under the procedure was that the Ethernet light didn’t blink at all. Whe…

You need an ext4 reader to access the user data partition.

If you cannot see any partitions at all with the Linux Reader (system partitions are ext3), or with the Paragon Software reader, either your SATA-USB adaptor is faulty, or your HDD. We cannot remotely diagnose between those two cases.

[Mahmoud_Tarief]

Thanks,
The SATA Cable has a led that is on, probably the hard disk is faulty. I will check further on the cable issue maybe it is faulty.

As a worst case scenario, is there a recovery for a faulty drive if I send it to a professional?

[cpt_paranoia]

@Mahmoud_Tarief

As a worst case scenario, is there a recovery for a faulty drive if I send it to a professional?

Depends on the nature of the HDD fault.

A fault in the read/head/rotor drive electronics; maybe: remove platters, place in working electromechanics, read data.

A head crash that has turned the platters to so much iron oxide: much more difficult. And expensive…

Again, not remotely diagnosable.

[Mahmoud_Tarief]

Thanks again so much.

I will keep the post updated for future visitors and the community.

[Bennor]

@Mahmoud_Tarief

As a worst case scenario, is there a recovery for a faulty drive if I send it to a professional?

Data recovery from a professional data recovery service can be very expensive depending on how damaged the drive is. WD has a page on Data Recovery:

Data Recovery | Western Digital

If one has setup Backups or Safepoints on the My Cloud (via the My Cloud Dashboard) then one can still access the last backup of the My Cloud contents on the backup device/drive.

[Mahmoud_Tarief]

Hi,

The problem was with the cable as it needs a lot of power more than the USB output.

I got a new caddy with SATA connection to USB and separate power, connected to my Ubuntu VirtualBox but the problem is that Ubuntu sees the 4 TB as un allocated space although the disk has lots of data. Is there anything to be done now? Good thing is the disk is working, but is the data lost?

Screen shot:

[Mahmoud_Tarief]

Thanks Bennor,

I’m trying to recover the data from the disk directly via USB through Ubuntu.
Having some issues but trying to figure it out.

[cpt_paranoia]

@Mahmoud_Tarief

Good thing is the disk is working, but is the data lost?

Go back to the thread I recommended above; that’s a known, and fairly ‘friendly’ process, using the Paragon Software free (limited trial period) ext3/ext4 driver software.

[chenjiawei1015]

Thanks again so much.

I will keep the post updated for future visitors and the community…