Pretty simple without having to open the drive to make a backup of the OS
Boot up the drive and enable SSH
Login to the drive using PuTTY (Windows) or Terminal on (OSX)
Type this command to reset the firmware to a factory state
/usr/local/sbin/factoryRestore.sh noreformat
Type this command to backup all of the OS partitions etc
dd if=/dev/sda of=/DataVolume/shares/Public/mycloud.img bs=1M count=5000
Wait around 5 minutes for it to finish and you should have a file named mycloud.img in your Public folder
Copy the file to your computer for safe keeping
The file will contain all partitions and some empty data from the data partition
Then you can just follow the MyBookLive guide to basically write the image back in the event you hard brick but you will want to save your data off the bricked drive before doing so as the image runs into the data partition 396MB for extra measure
When mounting the image in R-Linux you can see all the partitions are there along with 396MB of blank data from the data partition
