Great! I’m glad everything worked out. It’s crazy how much I learned messing with the MBL. It ended up being my gateway to setting up and administering remote servers generally running Ubuntu for years 
Take care!
Just letting you know…I would call it a fix! All is well this AM when I logged into the dashboard! So YIPPIE!
Thanks again for the How To and the help!
I have tried to follow this thread but got lost. I have a very old MBL that has a 2tb drive in it. I bought a 4tb NAS drive to put in it. I thought it had to be formatted ext3 or 4 and have it formatted ext3. Is it a matter of partitioning it to 3tb and dropping the 3tb image on it and then resizing it? I am a bit concerned that if I remove the 2tb drive that I will never be able to access it again and loose everything.
I have tried to backup the 2tb several times via Windows but no matter what version of Windows I used or what computer the copy would fail long before all files were copied.
Is there a guide for setting one up for 4tb and larger?
Thank you.
If you pull the 2TB drive just DO NOT do anything to it and then you can put it back in the MBL later and it will work. But if you do ANYTHING to it you’ll probably mess it up.
I tried that 4TB conversion on my 3TB (Original size of MBL). I think I did it but I was getting the same SMART error on the 4TB as on the NEW 3TB. That SSH cmd fixed my 3TB I’m pretty sure it would have fixed the 4TB issue I had but I didn’t know about it at the time.
If you’re as lucky as I was, nfodiz will pop in here and solve all your problems
I gave My Book to a Computer Tech who said he has retrieved before, he returned it to me and said it was dead, nothing he could do about it.
I have another drive I used for recording of the cable box but not longer use, thought I could use the bd. of it.
When I plugged the drive as you see it here, it in fact does spin up!
But I cannot see the contents of the drive, even when I use disk Internals Linux reader-
Can anyone suggest a way I may be able to get the data off this drive beside taking it a recovery site?
Thanks in advance
PB
Hello,
I have been through the guide successfully until step 12. But when I connect the disk to the home network again, it does not show up on the network. A green light is blinking at the back, showing network activity. I have searched for it without Advanced IP Scanner but without success.
Any hint about what I can do?
The old drive was a WD Caviar Green of 2 Tb from 2011. It has some 76 (4C exactly) errors and is now in a computer with some data on it (I have a backup of these data in case of a disk malfunction).
The new disk that I put in the MyBookLive is a WD Blue from February 2017.
Thanks,
wile_e
I’ve got a bricked MyBook LIve 2TB. It started clicking and fairly quickly stopped working and showed a solid red light. I can’t access the UI. The lights on the back indicates network access is fine.
I’ve tried to debrick by MyBook Live as the run through here: MyBook live debricking guide osx and windows from usb - Hacking WD MyBook World Ed
This seems essentially the same directions as this thread, just via mac+ubuntu.
It all seemed to work, but when I removed the HDD from the USB caddie and put it back into the NAS, I go the same red light, click and couldn’t access the UI.
I tried changing the power supply to a different one (with the same ratings), the click disappears, but I still get the red light and can’t access the UI. The lights on the back indicates network access is fine.
When in the USB caddie, I can see files in the Ubuntu file browser, and the disk recognises it has some 500GB+ of data. But I can’t find my data, only what appear to be system folders/files.
As far as I’m aware the HDD wasn’t encrypted, but was partitioned into if I remember correctly 4 partitions, only 1 of which I really want to recover. I see one partition when accessing via the USB caddie, and this seems to report the right amount of storage used.
What am I missing?
Do I need to plug the disk into a new NAS enclosure? If so which one will work?
I’d be more than content to lose the NAS functionality if there is a way to access the files through a non-NAS enclosure if that makes things easier.
Also: Is it worth pursuing this further if I think most of the valuable data is backed up elsewhere, but am not 100% certain?
Big thanks.
Hello
I tried the second guide with 3tb image for 4TB HDD and 6TB HDD but didn’t work either one.
once I successfully finish with steps in systemrescue part and place either 4 or 6tb HDD in MBL it starts with blue light goes to orange light sits like that for few min and than again goes to blue for few second and orange again, so sort of loop. I’ve read that some have applied your guide to 4tb HDD and worked without problem.
I tried also cloning partitions from it’s original 1tb hdd that is still working fine on to new 4tb HDD and resized data partition, but still did not work. is there a problem with the size of the HDDs? why wouldn’t it work?
thanks
hi
How do I know if the version of my device is v1 or v2?
Hi @nfodiz
Thanks for elaborate guide, however I’m having a problem when I’m trying to replace my 2TB drive, I hope you could spare some time and guide me where I’m going wrong.
Here are the details.
I have a MBL 2TB and the original hard disk failed. I have a 1TB Hard Disk with me, followed the details from V2 and boom, it worked fine. Since, I wanted more storage, I bought a 2TB drive and followed the same process, however, when I boot it up, it gets stuck on the yellow light forever. My router also does not assign an ip address.
When I check back in Gparted, I see that the v2 procedure it has created many other partitions and 1TB of ext4 partitions and 1TB of unallocated partition (which I know which would be expanded, once the MBL boots up fine).
I retried with my the 1TB hard disk and it worked fine again.
Could you tell me what I’m missing? Is there some place where I can go and look for logs and share them with you to help me debug?
TIA
I have a problem.
I followed the V2 guide but after copy mybook.img, I can’t reach the dashboard cause the MBL doesn’t get an IP!! The light is red also…
How can I do!?
First of all: many thanks for your guide, it brought me quite along.
I’ve an MBL 2TB with a dead HDD and try to unbrick it with a spare 1TB WD HDD I had by chance.
Everything worked fine (I had to use an old v7.0 image of the RescueImage to fit on a 700MB CD), partitions looking exactly as expected.
BUT: the MBL does not boot anymore. The LED is (and stays) blue, HDD is running, ethernet port is blinking away, but no green LED, and of course no IP assigned to it by the router.
First idea was that an 2TB MBL wasn’t capable of a 1TB HDD, but jonesthadi managed exactly that.
Any ideas?
Used MBLs come around 20 EUR here, it isn’t save anymore anyway, and I already bought a new Ultra with RAID1 (to avoid losing data to a single wrecked HDD), so I won’t invest that much time, but I feel like being in the final lap …
Short update: I just tried it with a spare Seagate (sic!) HDD. It still does not work (what I expected), but the LED is now red after some minutes instead of blue. So in principal the board seems to work and respond differently to a Seagate than the expected WD HDD.
Thank you @nfodiz!
My 2TB HDD died in the MBL last week.
I successfully installed OpenWRT using 1TB 2.5 old HDD and all worked great, but then decided to see if I could restore the WD OS.
Using the same HDD for OpenWRT my procedure was:
- Boot Ubuntu Live CD
- Connect the 1TB 2.5 to the PC using a USB-SATA cable
- Gparte or lsblk CLI command to see where the 1TB drive was mounted to
- Downloaded your image file
- Ran the DD command
- Put it back with the MBL board and power up
- Find the IP assigned in my DHCP server
- Connect to it via a browser using the IP
- Quick factory restore
- Done!
No decision on whether to keep OpenWRT or WD’s OS. Not exposed to the internet so security concerns on the old firmware are not a concern.
Now, just need to find a way to retrofit the 2.5 HDD/SSD in the case.
WD_my_cloud.img.gz - Google Drive I have created a image of the WD MyCloud 2 TB with dd from Linux. The thing is that using a live Linux version, you might need to resize the last partition to the size you have left on your hard disk that you’re restoring it. I have created the last partition of only 5 GB and it can be resized using Gparted.
The image needs to be restored using dd after being decompressed. I think this is an image I have restored it on a 160 GB HDD so good luck.
