First of all I would like to thank nfodiz for a great guide! You are doing a great job and helping lots of people!
Here are the results of installing fresh OS on two empty drives on MBLD. I will try to describe all steps in detail. This may be helpful for people who don’t have advanced technical knowledge. And I want to apologize for my bad English beforehand!
During preparation I did everything like nfodiz wrote except two things. I didn’t use Download SystemRescueCd, because I have only two SATA cables in my PC. I used USB thumb drive formatted to FAT32 with Linux Live CD (version Ubuntu 12.10 ) instead of it. If somebody is interested how to create one then you can check this link: http://www.linuxliveusb.com/
And I didn’t use USB thumb drive to copy “debrick.sh” and “rootfs.img” to it. I just put those two files in a folder on my hard drive with Windows and I could later access that folder from Linux and mount it from terminal. Be careful when you do this, because as nfodiz mentioned before if you mess up drive letters in Linux terminal you can erase your hard drive with Windows by accident.
So I had two clean hard drives 3 TB each without file system (space unallocated on both). I connected them one by one to my PC via SATA and each time booted into Linux from thumb drive. (For those who don’t know you must access your PC’s BIOS first and change boot setup order to boot from USB not from your hard drive with Windows.
Connect first hard drive to PC via SATA, boot into Linux from thumb drive (select Try Ubuntu, not Install Ubuntu!) and check in terminal which drive is assigned to which letter with the following command:
sudo fdisk –l
My drive with Windows was /dev/sda, so I typed:
sudo mount /dev/sda1
And it showed me that it is already mounted. After this I mounted folder with debrick.sh" and “rootfs.img”.
Now you will have to install mdadm package, because it is not installed on Live CD.
sudo apt-get install mdadm
When it is was installed I typed (Because my empty hard drive was assigned to /dev/sdb. Attention! Your hard drive can be assigned to a different letter! For example: /dev/sdc or /dev/sdd):
./debrick.sh rootfs.img /dev/sdb destroy
After debrick process is completed you shut down PC, disconnect the first hard drive, connect the second hard drive and repeat everything (you will even have to install even mdadm package again).
When hard drives were ready I placed only one of them into MBLD and booted it for test (Don’t forget to switch of the power cable when you connect or disconnect hard drives from MBLD!). LED on MBLD was red, but I could access its dashboard. Drive status in dashboard was “Bad”. RAID and status of both hard drives was shown as failed in storage. NB I was offered to upgrade to the latest (which is currently 02.41.05) automatically, but I canceled it. You will be offered to upgrade firmware each time you enter MBLD dashboard, but I don’t advise you to do it unless the drive is 100% ready. So I did a quick factory restore via dashboard, but nothing changed after reboot.
After this I placed both hard drives into MBLD and booted it. The LED was still red. I was still able to access dashboard. I did a quick factory restore via dashboard again. Now the LED wasn’t red anymore. It was yellow and I could access dashboard and drive status there was shown as “initializing”. Soon LED became green.
After this I connected to MBLD via PuTTY and typed:
mdadm --create -e 0 --verbose /dev/md2 --level=raid1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda3 /dev/sdb3
reboot
(mkswap /dev/md2 wasn’t created in the beginning)
After MBLD rebooted I connected to MBLD via Putty again and typed:
mkswap /dev/md2
reboot
Now after new reboot when I typed in PuTTY:
swapon –s
And got the following output (only Used had a different value):
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/md2 partition 500544 896 -1
Everything seemed to work, but when I tried to do a short diagnostic test I got the following message: Internal server error. Retry your last operation if the error persists, contact WD Support for assistance. Drive status in dashboard became “Bad”, LED color became red and I got alert that drive SMART check failed.
I found the following thread how to enable support on My Book Live. Thanks to nfodiz again for provided solution!
http://community.wdc.com/t5/My-Book-Live/Enabling-S-M-A-R-T-support-on-WD-My-Book-Live/td-p/548280
So I typed the following commands in PuTTY:
smartctl -s on /dev/sda
smartctl -s on /dev/sdb
reboot
After reboot I was able to complete quick diagnostic test. Drive status in dashboard became “Good” and LED green! Btw the drive is in striped mode (RAID 0) at the moment. So I guess it is setting RAID 0 by default as written in its manual.
It seems that MBLD is working fine now. I can access dashboard and MBLD shares via LAN.
In addition, please check the output from ‘parted’ command below:
MyBookLiveDuo:~# parted
GNU Parted 2.2
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type ‘help’ to view a list of commands.
(parted) p
Model: ATA WDC WD30EZRX-00A (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 3001GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
3 15.7MB 528MB 513MB linux-swap(v1) primary raid
1 528MB 2576MB 2048MB ext3 primary raid
2 2576MB 4624MB 2048MB ext3 primary raid
4 4624MB 3001GB 2996GB primary raid
Thanks!
