I’m not great at guides. Alot of people in these forums helped contribute to what I’m writing, here. I thought it best we have a central simplistic guide towards recovering our devices in the event of catastrophe.
BIG credits and thanks go to cnlinya for her work in the beginning of 2014, nfodiz for his MyBook Live guide, and resize fix, and WSGVET for his virgin 2TB My Cloud image. None of this was possible without their input.
Standard disclaimer: You void your warranty by doing anything in this post. I (and the above named) are not responsible if you lose your data, bork your drive, or otherwise cause the end of your universe. Back up your data. Give to the homeless. Hug a stranger.
It should be mentioned, this guide is a LAST RESORT to repair your My Cloud. _ THESE STEPS WILL RESULT IN THE LOSS OF ALL USER DATA. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. _
Pop the CD, the USB Drive, and the WD Hard Drive into the PC. (It is recommended you disconnect any other drives, to avoid confusion.) Boot off the CD.
Choose option 7 (Directly start the graphical environment). Tap enter when its looking for a keyboard map.
Type ‘gparted’ in the terminal window, and use it to determine what devices are what. (click GParted, and change devices) Take note of your Hard Drive (usually /dev/sda) and your USB Drive (mine was /dev/sdb). The partitions/sizes should be a big hint, especially if you have no other drives connected.
Close gparted, and enter the following commands in the terminal window: mkdir /mnt/usb mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb ls /mnt/usb
‘mycloud2tb.img’ should be the result. Time to overwrite everything… dd if=/mnt/usb/mycloud2tb.img of=/dev/sda
Be patient. Your hard drive is being overwritten and that takes some time. Your result should be
10240000+0 records in
10240000+0 records out
5242880000 bytes (5.2 GB) copied, xxx.xxx s, xx.x MB/s.
If you have a 2TB My Cloud, skip to step 18. Otherwise, continue.
Shutdown and reboot the CD. I’m not sure you need to, but it was necessary for me, so its in here. Same options as before, until you have a terminal window.
parted
Enter the following commands in the (parted) prompts: unit s p
Error: The backup GPT table is corrupt, but the primary appears OK, so that will be used. OK/Cancel? OK
Warning: Not all the space available to /dev/sda appears to be used, you can fix the GPT to use all of the space (an extra 39070080000 blocks) or continue with the current setting? Fix
We’re looking for the start sector of the last partition (4). I would think it would be the same on 3TB and 4TB, but I can only speak for the 4TB, which is 9428992. rm 4 mkpart primary
File system type? [ext2]? ext4
Start? 9428992s
Warning: You requested a partition from 9428992s to 7814037167s (sectors 9428992…7814037167).
The closes location we can manage is 9428992s to 7814037134s (sectors 9428992…7814037132).
Is this acceptable to you
Yes/No? Yes quit
Back to the command prompt… sync
Shutdown the PC, and (loosely) reassemble your My Cloud to its mini-board. Time to boot it and try it out!
(3TB/4TB Drives) Once you get to the dashboard, do a Quick Factory Restore. This reformats your data partition for the full size. Once it reboots, DON’T PANIC. It will show as only 2GB for a short time… eventually, it’ll wise up.
Remember, that first boot can take a while… I even had the flashing yellow light come on the first time (overheat warning?), but I power cycled it and it came right up, no problems. Don’t forget to put it back together!
Just to add, i managed to do this from a laptop using a SATA/USB connector, i did end up taking out the laptop hd though as i couldn’t work out how to change to the correct “unit” in command line parted. but its worked like a charm and mine rebooted showing the full 3.9tb.
it sure saved mine after i did something stupid and had no access to the drive at all (web ui or shell)
one thing i think is missing…
Ouglee wrote: 9428992s
Warning: You requested a partition from 9428992s to 7814037167s (sectors 9428992…7814037167).
The closes location we can manage is 9428992s to 7814037134s (sectors 9428992…7814037132).
on that bit it also asks for and end which is missing from the tut. I tried 7814037167 but that was too high so tried again with 7814037132 and that worked a treat.
(3TB/4TB Drives) Once you get to the dashboard, do a Quick Factory Restore. This reformats your data partition for the full size. Once it reboots, DON’T PANIC. It will show as only 2GB for a short time… eventually, it’ll wise up.
Remember, that first boot can take a while… I even had the flashing yellow light come on the first time (overheat warning?), but I power cycled it and it came right up, no problems. Don’t forget to put it back together!
ver 1.0
thanks for that tut, you safed me, but at 19. i do a quick factory restore and it shows after that 2tb but i have a 3tb. then i restart the cloud and its no change. at the moment i run the complete factory restore but that needs time to say how many tb its show after that.
i used the end of partition 4 that postet user “zelig”
Edit: Complete factory restore is done but it still shows on 2tb. Can anyone help or any ideas?
sorry for my bad english
edit2: I again used parted and the partition table had at the end of a 9th partition with the remaining unpartitioned 1TB. I then started from the tuturial from point 16 again and did “rm 4”, “rm 9” run (with “unit s” and look at the partition table “p” if the remaining unpartitioned area has really 9), dannach worked it without problems with “mkpart primary” and the rest of the tuturial.
I hope my text is understandable. I used groogle translator
I have used it to fix my WD My Cloud 2TB and all the process worked without any error. However, when I powered on the device again, it started to boot until it stopped in a stable red light… I left it for a while (about 20min) to see if it would change, but no change at all.
Do you have any idea on what I can do?
I did the whole image restauration process a second time to see it helped, but I got the same thing…
* Uncompressed the image using linux command line (throught the Rescue CD prompt). First time I had done with WinZip, in Windows.
* Comparing my partitions to the ones you posted, I noticed that I had an “alert” icon in the SWAP and EXT4 and you didn’t have it. So, after restorning the image, I formmated both Swap and Ext4 partitions… the icons stayed there, but anyhow, it was an action that I hadn’t done in the previous time.
I don’t know exactly what was the action that solved the problem, since I have applied both… but one of them (or both combined) made it work.
Many thanks again for the post!
******* And WD Engineers:
For next models of My Could, please include a clean image in a safe partition (or even in an independed internal memory) and a button for a REAL factory reset, in order to make a full restauration and avoid all this problems to your customers.
Many thanks for a great solution, which helped me out to recover my brickd My Cloud 2TB (I tried to install pyload before, and someting went wrong…) .
I recovered my drive using this solution, but now I have errors reported by DISK Smart, on UI on dashboard there is Warning state, and I am still receiving email with below message:
Message :critical
Code number: 0003
In that same thime while error is occuring the led is changing colour to red.
I don`t know what should I do now… could somebody help me ?
A SMART error is based on a failing hard drive… I’m not sure what an error 0003 is. Short answer, there isn’t any way to clear SMART errors (they report temperature, life hours of the drive, etc). You might try replacing the hard disk itself, but this (and all of these issues) are outside of the scope of this guide
You are My hero. I tryied several ways to bring back to life my My Cloud 3TB without succes. With your advice i actually did it without any knowledge at all in linux etc.
After i finished i did a Full factory restore because it only saw 1,5GB free space (which lasted 12+ hours). My Drive is now functioning again like new.
Hey I’ve done this and it works a peach however one question I have a 3TB drive and doing this now only shows as if it where a 2TB after soft factory reset how do u fix this?
edit2: I again used parted and the partition table had at the end of a 9th partition with the remaining unpartitioned 1TB. I then started from the tuturial from point 16 again and did “rm 4”, “rm 9” run (with “unit s” and look at the partition table “p” if the remaining unpartitioned areahas really 9), dannach worked it without problems with “mkpart primary” and the rest of the tuturial.
I hope my text is understandable. I used groogle translator
I have seen this but I am not quite sure what you mean?
