Happy Holidays everyone!
This guide has been years in development, but the problem is as the years get farther away from the original solution, it is far more difficult to get the guide to work.
I have tried the script with 6 Linux distributions and 2-3 versions of each (i.e. Knoppix, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, SaveCD, etc.) along with using a USB drive bay and direct SATA connection and this along with wasting nearly 3 weeks of my time trying to get it to work.
I have read the countless posts of frustration of individuals doing the same path I did just trying to get this ***** to work again…
Recently there was a post where someone posted the 2TB MBLD image, but I am going to take that one step further…
I reached out to a friend of mine in the drive business and amazingly enough, he had a factory fresh, never powered on MBLD 6TB version still in wrapper.
He let me borrow it for a few days and I was able to make a full drive image for both Drive A & Drive B utilizing Clonezilla. That’s right, FACTORY FRESH IMAGES OF BOTH DRIVES, So let me save many of you time & frustration…
Follow these instructions:
You need (2) USB sticks, one 32GB+ for images and one 4GB+ for Clonezilla
Download the following files (about 1.1GB in total for both)
Drive A
Drive B
*The zip files both grow to about 13GB each, thus the 32GB USB drive
Download CloneZilla (stable release) in ISO format
Download RUFUS 3.8, Rufus is an EXE file, drop on desktop…
Directions for restore.
1 - Insert 4GB USB, run RUFUS and select CloneZilla image and write to 4GB USB drive
2 - UNZIP both MBLD files (will create 2 directories) onto 32GB USB
3 - *IF YOU HAVE A PC, USE A SATA CONNECTION and connect a blank 3TB drive to be used as MBLD DRV A, does not matter if it is erased or not, CloneZilla will wipe.
**I have not tried this with a USB connected drive bay, so give it a shot, CloneZilla works very well with a USB based drive connector.
4 - Insert 4GB CloneZilla USB and 32GB Image USB and boot from CloneZilla USB
5 - Select all defaults to get to main menu of CloneZilla
*I am not sitting in front of PC, so I might be a little off here, I will edit shortly when I am in front of PC
6 - Follow the prompt (I believe it is the first option) for device-image / image-device from main menu
7 - USE BEGINNER MODE, not Expert, not needed…
8 - Browse to 32GB USB drive, and select the DRV A image
9 - Select Target drive (3TB SATA drive that was connected earlier)
10 - Follow prompts (it will ask you twice that you are sure to erase 3TB drive)
11 - Start imaging drive
12 - When complete, shutdown CloneZilla, disconnect DRV A, Connect DRV B and repeat steps 4-12
Looking at FRONT of MBLD, Insert Drive A on left and Drive B on right, connect to network, power on and wait about 5-10 mins… Light will change colors a few times.
After about 5 mins of running, you should be able to open your browser and either enter IP address of MBLD or the default web address and Walla! you are on the main login page asking to accept terms.
By Default, the MBLD is in spanning mode, you can change this to RAID one in the storage section.
I will edit this in more detail as I have some time over the next day or so, but I hope this makes life a LOT easier for the many of us who have been struggling for years to get our MBLD up and running again…
MBLD 8TB & greater users - I would invite someone who is more technically advanced than I am to take the images and figure out how to modify to make it a version for a larger drive. If you are able to do this successfully, let me know and Ill host the images for all to download…
In retrospect, I should have cloned the drives when I first got the unit, but who would have thought WD would have made it this difficult to get it back to working order.
Thanks everyone and I hope this helps!
