[GUIDE] Debrick a MyBookLive DUO

secyhaddad · January 12, 2019, 6:05pm

Hello Everyone

at first, sorry for my English, its not my native language

I have MBLD 6TB (2 * 3TB) that is connected to network all the time
but suddenly can not find in network any more.
solid yellow light is on all the time.
can not access dashboard.
reset button is not working as guided.
both drives are healthy
tried to connect via SATA - USB cable , and tried to access them through linux reader. not working either
even with direct SATA - SATA cable is not working.
i can see them put i can not open or explore them.

((((and I just want to save my data.))))

I’m not an expert in Linux and commands, thou i read ALL the guides and comments above, and in every where else. but i couldn’t understand how should i do. and i’m very afraid that i might make something wrong and wipe the whole data.

all my projects and years of study are in that disks.!

my question is:
Does this operation (Debricking) - can be done REMOTELY by any expert??

already i lost a whole week trying to figure out how to recover my data, but no clue.

so if it is possible, PLEASE refer me to some one who can help in this matter.

Thank you all in advance.

secyhaddad · January 15, 2019, 5:26pm

Hello everyone,

I followed Guide 1 - step by step, except at the end when i finished debricking the device could not boot with the two drives inside.
i tried to to boot it only with drive A and then it works, but when access the dashboard i have this note which tell: drive could not mount.

I made some search in other threads and there is a guy/girl who had ran into the same situation and inserted drive B after boot. then the drive is discovered and he/she just reboot the device then it works.
as he/she said: RAID is rebuilding and after finish he/she just recreate the shares and he/she finds all the data.

in my case i did what he/she did, but i couldn’t find the data. i recreate everything but find NOTHING.
tried some recovery software but all i get is random files with different names with no folder structure. useless.

HELP PLEASE !! I REALLY NEED THE DATA.

j1406gates · April 3, 2019, 4:26am

Don´t know if it´ll help but you should try Knoppix as your live cd. I recently purchased a case only MyBookLive DUO from ebay, and had the toughest time debricking it using 2 new WD Red 4Tb drives and this debricking process. I followed the process using SystemRescueCd and ubuntu as the live cd media, but no matter how many times i tried it didn´t work. I kept readying then on page 116 of this post vlyapunov mentioned Knoppix. I tried it and my MyBookLive DUO finally worked. Maybe the issue is the live cd version you´re using. Just a thought.

subaruman44 · May 25, 2019, 5:37pm

hello everyone, so i have been going at debricking mybook live duo for 2 days now and i cant get it to boot, i recently bought 2 used duos a 6tb and a 8tb both working great, the seller showed me how to set it up etc, but he didnt get a chance to erase them so i zeroed it out for him and now im here . didnt know like most of you guys the operating system is in the drive. so all 4 drives are blank 2x3tb 2x4tb. i followed guide 2 and still no go i typed the commands. anything i do i still get the yellow light of death haha. i dont know what software to run i downloaded the “mbl_duo_windows_setup” but tries to set up and cant find it. not even my router gets an ip for the duo. im using the systemrescuecd got the debrick script on my flashdrive and the newest 2015 firmware i tried the link of the 2012 one here as well.
do this code but with system rescue cd
mkdir /mnt/usb
mount -t vfat /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usb
cd /mnt/usb
mdadm -S /dev/md0 (stopped md0)
mdadm -S /dev/md2 ( doesnt do anything)
mdadm -S /dev/md3 (doesnt do anything)
./debrick.sh rootfs.img /dev/sda destroy
i type Y for everything it comes up and then says all done! after i get these partitions

after i do both drives and put them in the enclourse i get only yellow led. so i take disk A out put back to linux and i get this to see the partitions

only difference is two keys on 1.91gb partitions
does this look good what am i doing wrong any help is greatly appreciated
i dont really know linux i even tried the knoppix 8.2 live cd from the last comment and i couldnt even find gpart, thank you for your help

hutchel · August 29, 2019, 12:40am

OK i have created the rescue CD (USB Version) and when I get to the point of running gparted both MBLD 2x2TB (should have been Raid 1) drives show as unallocated space. So the original partition tables appear to be corrupted. At this point I am just interested in recovering the last 6 months of data - I have an older backup.

Started with a solid yellow LED and a set of very hot drives.

Appreciate any help.

yanivps · October 26, 2019, 2:12pm

Hello everyone
The year is almost 2020 and I see people are still struggling with bricked MBLD. Actually, this is also how I got here…

After 2 days of struggling myself with debricking my device I finally managed to do it.
Everything I tried didn’t help me to pass the yellow led which I was stuck on.
In my situation after 2 minutes of yellow led, device was rebooting by itself, then I saw the blue led for couple of seconds and then the yellow led again until the next self reboot
No “ping” reply from the MBLD device whatsoever.

I noticed that I was receiving some errors in the debrick script output.
What was even stranger is that the md partitions that were created (not really sure yet what exactly is md partition but I understood it is something related to RAID) were md126 and m127 and not md0 and md2
I did the debrick process with SystemRescue CD and also with different versions of Ubuntu (12.10, 16, 18) and I noticied that with each operating system that I try, the results are a bit different and errors that I get from the script are a bit different.

It made me think that maybe this old thread (I am talking about 2013 when it was created) using tools in older versions than the version I’ve used when I was downloading the same tools (I am talking specifically about SystemRescue CD)

So I went to older version repository of SystemRescue CD and downloaded systemrescuecd-x86-3.2.0.iso file which was release somewhere around 2012-12-31 (here is a link to download this version)

In my case, I managed to take out the data I had on the HDD with the software R-Linux so I could try Guide 2 which talking about installing MBLD OS on a new unalloacted disk

I also read in this thread that when running the same debricking script twice with a reboot between each try, some of the errors disappear
I did that for both Disks (A and B) and this time when I connected disk A and saw the yellow led again (I tought I am stuck in the same loop again), I tried a ping from a network computer to mybookliveduo hostname and I saw a response so I managed to login to the dashboard!
Once you login to the dashboard the rest should be fine, you probably need to turn off MBLD put the second disk (Disk B) as well and turn on the device and perform a Factory Reset from the dashboard. The main issue as I see it is getting to the dashboard

So here is a summary of the steps I’ve performed:

Connecting Disk A to a computer with SATA cable and with R-Linux program copy my data to an external drive
copy rootfs.img and debrick.sh to a folder in my existing SATA drive in my current computer (instead of using a USB thumbdrive as suggested here). The reason I chose the method of running script from SATA HDD instead of using a USB thumbdrive is because I noticed that the debrich.sh script is writing a file called ./swap.c which is compiled to ./swap executable but when this is done on a mounted USB I don’t have permissions to execute this file. So please try as well not to work with USB thumbdrive but with another HDD connected to the computer
create a bootable usb with SystemRescue CD 3.2.0 (link was posted previously in my message)
Boot my computer from USB with SystemRescue
In gparted software I saw both hdd that were connected to my computer (sda was the 3TB HDD of MBLD and sdb was the 500Gb HDD of my computer). Then I deleted all of the partitions in the 3TB WD Disk. you click on each partition and the delete button in gparted. The delete button does not delete, only enqueue a task to delete them. Then you need to click on the commit button in gparted. If you get some errors click ignore. After this, you should see all space as unallocated
Mount sdb3 (in my case, it was my local computer’s 500GB HDD, “Local Disk D” partition, of my Windows OS, with the img and script files) to /mnt/pc in order to get to the debrick.sh script and the rootfs.img. In my case this were the commands

mkdir /mnt/pc
mount -t ntfs/dev/sdb3 /mnt/pc # I use ntfs because this is the type of my local HDD

Then I ran this command

ls /dev/md*

in order to see existing /dev/mdXXX folders
8. Ran the set of commands:

cd /mnt/pc/path/to/script_and_img_file # change this to your relevant path
mdadm -S /dev/mdXXX # I ran this line for each /dev/mdXXX folder that I saw when I ran the “ls /dev/md*” command
./debrick.sh rootfs.img /dev/sda destroy

Script was done with errors. No matter what errors appeared in the script I reboot the computer and boot again SystemRescue from USB
Now I repeated the same steps from step 6 (without deleting partitions this time). This time I didn’t get errors in the script. I rebooted again for the third time in SystemRescue and this time it was to verify that I have to md partitions called md0 and md2. I checked this with this command:

ls /dev/md*

If you see only md0 and md2 you are good to go! if you see md126 / md127 or any other md, retry the steps from step 6

Now I shutdown my computer, disconnect 3TB HDD from my computer and put it in the Disk A slot of the MBLD device.
I powered on MBLD and this time after 1 minute of Yellow LED, I managed to ping mybookliveduo and connect to dashboard: http://mybookliveduo

If I tought it is impossible to debrick my device in my case and I managed to, I am sure 99% that you can do that as well unless your drive is physically damaged. Just make sure you are connecting your WD HDD directly to a computer with SATA cable and not using any SATA to USB and try what I wrote step by step

So after seeing so many “Thanks NfoDiz” I can write this as well!
@nfodiz I do recommend you to update the link to SystemRescue CD to the version I posted so if people only ready your first message in the beginning of this thread, chances of success are bigger.

DriveAngel · January 4, 2020, 4:46pm

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!

nongrata23 · February 14, 2020, 4:27pm

thank you so much, i made an acc just to say that (now trying to fix my **** i`ll report back)

how long it takes to restore one hdd? i tells me around 5h one hdd, is corect? (it takes like 6 hours )

i made only for one hdd, and i managed too boot into the web interface of it and started to work!

Thank youuuu so much for this

Regards

Step · March 12, 2020, 9:37pm

Hello all,

I also managed to de-brick my MyBookLiveDuo (spanning mode, no data loss) using guide 1 and the hints from from “yanivps”

I bricked my MyBook by trying to uninstall some of the tools (mediacrawler, orion) which took a lot of cpu and thus bandwidth. Unfortunately, I also uninstalled some required tools (as it seems), since after a reboot I only saw the white(yellow?) light and could not access the MyBook (neither via ssh nor ui) anymore.

The problems I had during debricking:

Problem 1)
In Step 5 of guide 1 I should call “mdadm -S /dev/md0” (and the same command for md2 and md3). I had the same problem as yanivps. In my /dev folder there was no md0/md2/md3, only md126 and m127, so I called mdadm for those two files/devices only.

Problem 2)
As yanivps pointed out, the debrick script does not work with the current version (6.0.7) of SystemRescueCD. “gcc missing” was the error which I got. gcc is needed to compile a small c program within the debrick script. After a bit of googling I found out, that SystemRescueCd 5.2.0 does contain gcc, so I used this one.

Problem 3)
The next error I got was the same as pTomic: “warning: implicit declaration of function ‘lseek64’” during the execution of the debrick script. Google told me that two compiler directives are missing:
#define _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE
#include <sys/types.h>
So I added them to the beginning of the C program within the debrick script.

Problem 4)
(which is not a problem as it seems)
During the execution I now saw the same error as merdzd:
mdadm: super0.90 cannot open /dev/sdb3: No such file or directory
The script finished anyway and told me that everything worked fine.

I put drive A back into the enclosure and after a while (less than 10min actually), I saw a green flickering light and could access my MyBook via UI and ssh again.

I had two manually re-add the users and shares (as written in the guide) and then I was able to access all my data.

Thanks everyone for the help.

Nick_M · April 10, 2020, 11:44pm

Thank you very much, DriveAngel ! You did a fantastic job. You made an old grandpa (that’s me) so happy! You even can’t imagine how much good things you’ve done for me. Previously I spent so much time (since February) trying to debrick My 2012 MBLD 6TB.
And finally, with your help, I made everything working perfectly.
(I didn’t need to preserve my data, because I do additional backup copies.)
I didn’t have an empty USB flash drive. So I used an old SATA HDD for images, connecting it along with the target Disk A, then Disk B to my desktop-PC, one at a time. I was running Clonezilla from CD.
My both original 3TB drives A and B are old and have errors with “yellow” warning in CristalDiskInfo SMART. Despite of this, the installation was successful. I was impatient, and first tried just Disk A. and bingo! It became accessible in several minutes (with red light). During this hard time I stay home, and don’t have an opportunity to buy new hard drives. The PC parts I ordered online on March the 3d and later, - are still in transit. - No delivery. But so far, I am good, (experimenting with a new single 6TB Seagate on MBLD, that I have got on sale, and keep it as a spare).
Thank you very much again for the help, for your great instructions !

Nick_M · April 14, 2020, 5:26am

Hello Step,
Thank you for the help! I’d like to confirm you that after switching to SystemRescueCd 5.2.0 and changing the debrick script by adding
#define_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE
#include <sys/types.h> ,
everything worked perfectly for me.
Just right away I was able to run GUIDE 2, and fresh install MyBookLiveDuo on my two WD10EZEX. I used these disks for training purpose, practicing while waiting for the delivery of two new disks of larger capacity.
I added those two lines exactly as they look, just after the 1st description at the beginning of the script. Although I still don’t know where exactly they are suppose to be located.
There was a warning on the screen in red letters related to swap.

Anyway, I tested, and everything is OK, the My Book Live Duo works perfectly.
Thank you very much.

tescor · April 16, 2020, 3:14pm

Hola Nick, necesito ayuda.
Finalmente he conseguido realizar la Guía Nº 2
He seguido todos los pasos hasta el final, primero con el disco A y luego con el disco B.
Cuando los he colocado dentro de mi MBLD, he observado que al encenderlo el led era de color azul, más tarde pasó a color amarillo.
Y se mantiene amarillo, aunque por unos segundos cambia a azul y vuelve otra vez a ponerse amarillo.
No lo encuentro a través de IP, ni tampoco con el explorador de archivos de Windows.
Le he hecho un reset con el botón trasero y no cambia nada.
Puedes ayudarme? Que es lo que he hecho mal? O me falta algo por hacer?
Agradezco toda la ayuda posible, saludos.
Mi correo electónico: tescor70@gmail.com
2020-04-15T22:00:00Z

Nick_M · April 16, 2020, 5:43pm

Hi tescor,
I was getting the same problem when I did my experiments with my Seagate Barracuda 6TB ST6000DM003 hard drive disk. Whatever I tried to do several times, - it failed to boot in MBLD.
The light went trough blue to yellow, and stayed solid yellow forever.

But everything went good and smoothly from the first attempt with my WD disks 2x3TB and 2x1TB.

By the way, I even did not have a problem to boot the MBLD, and I got access via ‘WD SmartWare’ and ‘Dashboard’ and Windows Explorer with just one, a single WD hard disk, - any either A or B. There were no problems with copying, editing, deleting files when only a single WD HDD was inserted. (However, the indicator light was red.)

The problem with my Seagate 6TB HDD was found when I inserted it together with my good working WD HDD, and plugged in the MBLD. The light went through blue, yellow and stayed red.
The MBLD became accessible, but in the ‘QuickView’ and ‘Dashboard’ I could see an error message for my Seagate HDD: - “Incompatible hard disk”.
So, incompatibility might be a possible problem in your case.

Also,

tescor · April 17, 2020, 8:49am

Muchas gracias Nick_M, por tomarte la molestia de contestarme.
Los discos que estoy utilizando son los 2 originales de WD de 3TB (WD GREEN WD30EZRX).
Esoy trabajando exclusivamente en un My Book Live Duo.
Estoy bastante decepcionado, son más de 6 horas de trabajo por disco y el resultado ha sido negativo.
No entiendo mucho de Linux y he obserbado que personas han tenido que añadir un script:

define_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE

#include <sys / types.h>
No sé que es esto del script, ni como se pone.
¿Puede ser este mi problema?
De nuevo muchas gracias.

tescor · April 17, 2020, 10:44am

Una pregunta:
Cuando conecté mis discos duros a SystemRescueCD, con el GParted, yo les hice 3 Particiones porque los discos duros los tenía formateados con Windows en NTFS.
Les creé 3 particiones a cada disco duro antes de empezar con el terminal de Linux.
Hice 2 particiones con formato ext3 de 2048MB cada una y el resto de disco lo formateé en ext4.
He hecho lo correcto?
Gracias, por vuestra ayuda.

Nick_M · April 21, 2020, 6:33pm

Hi tescor, with your original disks, the instructions “Factory Fresh Images” by DriveAngel (see above):

[GUIDE] Debrick a MyBookLive DUO - #248 by DriveAngel

should work for you. Those instructions worked perfectly for me.
Yes, it takes time though, more than 6 hours in my case.
You do not need to pre-format your DiskA and DiskB. (Not necessary.)
By the way, I made my disk empty by running ‘clean’ command from ‘diskpart’ in ‘Command Prompt’ (CMD) on both disks. (But this is not necessary as well.)
First, I recommend to check the SMART of your disks, by running ‘Crystal Disk Info’ from Windows Desktop-PC. CrystalDiskInfo - Crystal Dew World [en] .
Now you can compare what I did:
1} Download Clonezilla zip file.
2) Unzip, and get the ISO image.
3) Burn the ISO image on to CD, and the CD becomes bootable.
4) Connect the empty DiskA to SATA port of the Desktop-PC.
5) Connect the drive with DRVA (and DRVB) to the Desktop-PC.
6) Set ‘Boot from CD’ in the BIOS of the Desktop-PC.
7) Boot from CD, and restore from image DRVA to DiskA.

It is important to come to the right menu and choose the right command

Sometimes it might happen that you can’t get to the right menu. Then don’t hesitate to choose ‘Cancel’, and come to the previous screen, and get an opportunity to start over again.
Try everything possible until you get a chance to ‘Restore an image to local disk’

Finally, you come to the last step:

Choose ‘Shutdown manually’.
Shut down, and install DiskA into MBLD.
Now you can try to boot the MBLD with just one single DiskA. It worked for me successfully.
Repeat for restore from image DRVB to DiskB.

Nick_M · April 21, 2020, 9:43pm

First, you can preserve the original script by changing its name.
Then you can open the script in Windows Notepad and edit it by adding two lines.
[Don’t forget to choose ‘All Files (*.")’ while opening.]
Save the new changed script under the name debrick.sh.

I tested that updated script and I installed the MBLD successfully on my two WD10EZEX hard disks.
Thanks to Step

patrique · May 8, 2020, 6:19pm

Helllo, this is my first time using this kind of support.
I have two 3TB disks. I’m following the guide 1.
When i get to the point when i have to write mdadm -S /dev/md0 im getting an:
mdadm: error opening /dev/md0: No such file or directory
The same situation repeats to /dev/md2 and /dev/md3.
I saw that someone had the same problem and someone else helped him to get through.
Unfortunatlly i can’t find anywhere the message with answer.
Do you have any ideas how to fix this?

patrique · May 8, 2020, 6:31pm

Hi.
I got a question for you.
So you just turned it all off, started again later and it worked?

subaruman44 · May 15, 2020, 1:27pm

Thank you DriveAngel. I tried doing it myself a few months ago(even posted a few months back), saw mybook in the Garage over the weekend and wanted to try again. and your image method worked perfectly. thanks again