I have a 4tb MyCloud device that stopped communicating with the network and had the red light on the front of it.
Eventually I ended up taking the drive out and connecting it directly to a pc via SATA. I can’t get the drive to even show up. I tried doing this through Linux as well and nothing shows up. As if there is no drive connected. You can feel the drive spinning and it seems to operate fine.
If I buy a used device “3tb MyCloud” and swap the drive with mine, is it possible it will just work as it was?
I really just need to get the data off at this point. We already bought a new My Cloud EX2 Ultra and implemented it on our work network to replace the failed drive.
What specific My Cloud device did you remove the drive from? A single bay My Cloud? A My Cloud Home? A multi bay My Cloud model?
The single bay My Cloud hard drive data partition is formatted in Linux EXT4 and to view that partition on Windows one will have to use a Linux driver or use Linux or a Linux boot disk/flash drive.
If one has a single bay My Cloud model (not My Cloud Home) then it depends on the version/generation of your single bay My Cloud when it comes to swapping in another single bay My Cloud hard drive. You cannot swap a first gen My Cloud hard drive into a second generation My Cloud nor vise versa. The second generation single bay My Cloud uses different hardware and a different operating system than the first generation single bay My Cloud.
One can “unbrick” a new hard drive to work in a single bay My Cloud enclosure. Do a forum search (magnifying glass icon top right) to find many past discussions on how to unbrick a hard drive to use in a single bay My Cloud enclosure.
I did try accessing the drive using a Linux boot disc, but couldn’t get it to show up. The drive didn’t even show up in bios but you can feel it spinning.
I brought it to a data recovery person who said it did show up but didn’t appear to have any data on it, which would be the case if it’s encrypted.
Swapping it into a new My Cloud is just a last ditch effort.
The single bay My Cloud does not encrypt the data on the drive. More likely the drive is going, or has already gone, bad. Recovery services tend to be very expensive and they may not be able to recover all (or any) of the data on a corrupted, damaged or dead hard drive. One can search the internet for various methods of attempting to recover data from a Linux partition.
First gen single bay My Cloud has a P/N # that ends with “-00” (P/N: WDBCTLxxxxxxx-00).
Second gen single bay My Cloud has a P/N # that ends with “-10” (P/N: WDBCTLxxxxxxx-10).
If one had been using the My Cloud Safepoint / Backup feature to backup their My Cloud to an external USB hard drive one could simply “unbrick” their My Cloud with a new hard drive and restore that backed up data. Use the forum search feature to find the many past discussions (and methods) of “unbricking” a drive to work in a single bay My Cloud enclosure.
If the hard drive isn’t mounted/seen by Linux (make sure to try different powered 3.5 inch hard drive SATA adapters as a troubleshooting step) and Linux cannot find or mount any of the partitions on the hard drive then buying another My Cloud enclosure to put the drive into is likely going to be a waste of money and time. This likely isn’t an issue of a corrupted My Cloud OS, rather an issue with the failed drive hardware itself.
