DRIVE B Fail

WD Legacy Products Other Network Drives
1
Device Name: MyBookWorld
Firmware: 01.01.18
Drive Status: Drive B Failed

The above is what is shown on the top right corner of the login page.

The drive started acting weird (like could not connect) on me a couple of weeks ago.

I had this drive setup in Secure Volume RAID-1.

After the drive failed, I lost 18 months of data; family photos was by far the most valuable data on it.

I was under the impression that a RAID-1 setting was the most secure data store configuration in case of Faillure.

My Mistake was to rely on the the RAID-1 and not doing any backup to CD or DVD.

I removed the Deffective drive (Drive B) and boot the MyBookWorld again to see if the lost data would come back but no such luck.

Now I’m not sure what to do.

Is the data lost forever?

What should I have done differently to prevent this type of data loss?

Is there a way to recover the data from the Deffective drive?

I am based in Ottawa / Canada

Any help would be appreciated

2

What you need to do is replace the drive that has alegedly failed and do a rebuild. Providing you haven’t done anything else to it all your data should still be there.

I have a MyBookWorld II with the blue rings. Inside it has 2x500GB disks. I had to replace drive A a couple of weeks ago and after the rebuild all my data was there fine. I couldn’t get exctly the same model drive as was in there, but I replaced it with a WD5000AAKS which cost me about £40, so probably $80 Canadian.

If you take a look in the WD KnowledgeBase you should look at article 1464 to replace the drive, then article 1496 which tells you how to rebuild the mirror array.

Don’t know what your level of experience/confidence is, but you could also try putting the failed drive in a SATA caddy attached to a PC which has ext2 drivers installed and see if you can recover the data that way

Hope this helps.

3

Thanks GMan2XS,

Yes it does indeed help - if nothing else to give me hope I can recover the lost data.

Why is it though that you need a two have both drive to recover the data on the working drive?

It’s a bit weird ! Any thoughts?

Are you also saying that the drive may still be good?

That too would be very weird that MyworldBoook II would claim it’s failling.

4

Dunno, but I couldn’t access the data on the unit after the drive was reported as failed. I guess if you took the good drive out, put it in a SATA caddy and attached it to a PC with the right drivers you may be  able to pull all the data off, but I didn’t wan’t to risk screwing anything up so I just did it by the book.

However, after the recovery was complete and I knew my data was safe I just tried putting the “failed” disk in the SATA caddy for a laugh. I expected it to just be dead as a dodo, but to my surprise it powered up and by mounting the correct partition using ext2 drivers I could see all my data sitting there. I had it mounted readonly, but I copied some stuff off to another disk and it was fine. Maybe the original problem was overheating or the drive is flakey in some other way? It couldn’t be a WD scheme to sell more drives, no surely it couldn’t be that =;~)