I’m glad there is a guide like this out there. My 2 Tb MyBook Live decided to tank during a firmware upgrade. I kept receiving alert notification emails about the drive while I was away at work, which looked like this:
Following events are generated on your MyBookLive NAS.
Event title:???
Event description:???
Severity:info
Event code:
Event time:06-09-2013 08:31:43 PM
Firmware version:02.42.02-012
In any case, I’d like to try these steps to see if I can recover it, but the problem is that I have a Mac. I have no access to any Windows machines at all, which means that most of the software referenced in this guide won’t work. Is there anything I can do?
Ok, I’m back. 26 hours of scanning by disk internals partition recovery and the program locked up. Now I’ve tried to run fsck /dev/sda4 and get the following:
Try this guide and lemme know how it goes. Your gonna have to run the commands from terminal on the system rescue cd because you have no SSH. You can disreguard the reboot commands. That is about as much knowledge as I have for fixing a filesystem.
nfodiz, you are awesome. I truly appreciate everything you have done. If this doesn’t work I’ll try Parted Magic. By the way, I’m a Texas born griller myself. You can’t beat grilled food. I wish I could hand you off a beer or cocktail. You deserve it.
Well the unit is once again readable and showing up on the dashboard. Unfortunately all of the files are gone.:mansad:
I have tried everything to find the files(R-linux, disk internals reader, Partedmagic etc) but some 2,000 plus files (over a terabyte and 9 months worth of work) are gone with the wind. Oh well I guess I’m supposed to redo everything over but better. That must be the silver lining. If anyone knows of any company that can retrieve these files for a reasonable fee, let me know please.
Nfodiz, you are one heck of a good fellow. The best thing to come out of this catastrophy is meeting a real gentleman like you. Mankind is not doomed. I hope the grilled items came out perfect.
Wow that wasn’t supposed to happen and I do apologise. WD does have a list of recommended data recovery companies on their website. Gimme a sec and I’ll throw you the link. I don’t think all hope is lost just yet
I did try test disk but it asked me to a choose a partition type for the repair funciton and there were none on the list that matched Linux so I was confused about that. I just threw in the towel. I spent 3 days on this due to my lack of Linux knowledge and I could have made a lot of money designing solar energy systems instead. I’m just going to move on and re do my work a little at a time. I’m doing a full factory restore on the My Book Live and will use it as a second backup in conjunction with the new one I bought. I’ve also now got a new 3TB drive in my computer where I am going to keep the primary file copies as well so that will be 3 locations. A monthly blu-ray backup will be the extra measure.
I can’t thank you enough for all of the time you gave me. If you ever need solar design work or any other electrical engineering work, email me at bnwitt at yahoo dot com
As a foot note, I have ubricked, and done a complete factory restore and the unit is still erratic. When I try to run a short or full diagnostic, it comes back with a server internal error. A reboot is sometimes successful and other times never gets past the yellow led OS loading mode. I am beginning to believe the controller is malfunctioning. I guess the next step is to remove the HDD and install it in my machine so I still have some value from the unit. Oh well.
You can try the image from my v2 debrick guide. I imaged a brand new 3TB drive I just bought a couple of weeks ago. The recovery stuff we tried could have messed something up that even a factory restore won’t fix.
Please hold for link (This guide is SUPER EASY) Guide 2 is for a 3TB MBL
Has anyone had success with this on a Mac? I’ve been trying to follow the instructions running Windows 7 on the Mac via Parallels but it doesn’t seem to recognise the System Recovery CD as a valid boot CD. Any suggestions? Apart from get a PC of course. This is driving me mental.
Google around a bit, you should be able to boot some Live distribution of Linux on a MAC directly. I wish I had a better answer for you but I haven’t used a MAC since High School back in 1987-1990
I have a MyBookLive 2TB and my son dropped it from just 30/40cm high last saturday…It was working perfectly but after the fall it just showed solid yellow led then a blue and cycling in a loop between solid yellow and blue. It’s no more detected by my laptop, my TV or by my router. My first priority is to recover my data. After quite a bit of reading for help on this forum and others, I have decided to follow instructions from this post. So I have open the unit and plug the MBL hard drive to my PC (windows7 64bits) with a SATA to USB cable. The PC couldn’t detect the MBL drive. I have then downloaded DiskInternal Linux Reader and R-Linux. DiskInternal Linux Reader detects the disk showing a disk icon with a question mark and describing it as “empty” and when I try to open it tells me “Can’t open disk. Check the disk and try again”. R-Linux just detects an “empty” Virtual disk.
So I am stuck right now.
Any idea if the drive is fully dead or if there is anything else I could try to recover my data?
Was the MBL powered up at the time it was dropped?
If not, do you hear anything when you power up the drive? Does the drive spin up?
If you can’t hear it spin up, then if I had to hazard a guess, the shock of the drop knocked the heads off the parking ramps and the platters can’t spin up.
This usually results in an unusable drive.
There are ways to recover the data, but unless you’ve got a cleanroom setup, you’ll probably need to send the drive to a professional.
Are there any Linux based distros that have a Live CD that will boot on a MAC that you know of?
I hope the grilled items came out perfect.
Of course you can’t grill without a cold beer as well 
