I upgraded my 2nd gen WD My Cloud OS5 from 4TB to 12TB (WD Red Plus 12TB). Had a lot of problems, because I always got red light after cloning 4TB to 12TB when I put it in the NAS. Since my 4TB WD My Cloud was already upgraded from OS3 to OS5, maybe there where the reason of my problems.
I tried Clonezilla, AOMEI and DiskGenius for cloning in various modes, but always same red light result. I have an old AM3 motherboard so I tried it on new AM4 B550 motherboard, but got same red light result. I tried to resize the data partition to 12TB, and not resize it to 12TB after cloning, but same red light result.
I almost gave up, but then a friend of mine said he has a HDD cloning device. You put first HDD in first slot and 2nd HDD in 2nd slot and press start, and it worked. I got finally stable blue light and could login to WD My Cloud with browser, but I could not read any data from it. I did a SYSTEM ONLY RESTORE in SETINGS/UTILITY that should preserve the cloned data, but I got an empty 4TB HDD on my 12TB drive.
So I cloned the drives again with HDD cloning device, but this time I resize the data partition on the new 12TB HDD. Data was also not readable when I put it in the NAS. I did SYSTEM ONLY RESTORE and got an empty 12TB NAS.
Then I connected my old 4TB to PC with serial ATA, and the WD MY Cloud NAS with 12TB on the network. Then boot in windows. Install Ext2 File System Driver from sourceforge.net and mount old 4TB drive in Windows. Then you can access your files and copy it to new HDD in NAS. After that I got finally my data in new 12TB NAS working.
I hope it helps someone to spare a lot of time I lost in trying to get it finally working.
Sorry to open up this thread after almost 2 year... :innocent: Looks like my old WD My Cloud drive is starting to die as I am getting RED LED after a while. Thinking about swapping 3TB for a 5TB. Best to clone with Windows or with Ubuntu? as I have two computers. Also is it best to remove the drive from the My Cloud and put it in an USB external enclosure to do the cloning?
Turns out it was not the HD but the power supply flaking out. Replaced power supply and thus far all seems right with the world of WD.
Generally you will have to remove the single bay/single drive My Cloud hard drive from it’s enclosure to clone it. Don’t know if anyone has successfully cloned the My Cloud hard drive while still in it’s enclosure to a hard drive attached to the My Cloud’s USB port.
There are various methods to clone or backup the drive. It typically comes down to what you have available and if you are cloning to a smaller hard drive from a larger one. Best would be to have two available SATA ports and clone direct from drive to drive. Otherwise if you only have a single SATA port then you likely have to image the drive then restore that image to the new hard drive. There are various hard drive docking stations out there that have two or more SATA ports and can do direct source to same or larger sized destination hard drive clone.
Or one can use any of the various “unbrick” methods discussed in this subforum to setup a new hard drive in the My Cloud enclosure.
Note that if you go the unbrick router you will need to know which single bay My Cloud version you have since the unbrick directions are different for the first gen single bay My Cloud than the second generation single bay My Cloud.
First gen: P/N number on bottom of My Cloud ends in “-00” and the unit uses v4.x firmware.
Second gen: P/N number on bottom of My Cloud ends in “-10” and the unit uses v2.x or v5.x firmware.
Fastest drying I could find here in Colombia. The Silver WD badge cracked as you can see due to them not only using clips to hold it in place but they also glued it in.
I’ve cloned the whole OS3 system (My Cloud gen1) to another WD Black 2.5" 7200RPM drive with SATA to USB 3.0 cable under ssh using DD command, cloned drive boots up and works as expected.
Love the black painted cover @Mark_Knight, my badly yellowed WDMC needs something similar, trying to find the cheapest (safe) method of painting over the yellowed plastic, does the plastic surface have to be sanded down before painting?
