Is it possible to remove the hard drive from within the MyCloud and place in another NAS enclosure?

Pretty sure my MyCloud is dead/bricked as for over 24 hours it has been giving me a constantly flashing blue power light and I cannot connect to it. I am hoping that the hard drive itself might be ok and my data may still be intact so I would like to remove the hard drive from the device and place it into an alternative NAS enclosure. Does anyone know if this is possible or know of any reasons why this wouldn’t work? I want to try to recover my data from the drive more than unbricking as I understand that any attempt at unbricking would require a wipe of the drive.

One can remove the My Cloud hard drive from it’s enclosure and connect it, via a USB to SATA adapter (or spare SATA adapter on the computer) and access the My Cloud drive contents using Linux or a Linux Boot CD or using a Linux driver in Windows.

If using Windows the following discusses it further.

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that’s exactly what i would do :slight_smile:

The OP though, wanting to but the hard drive into an alternative NAS enclosure most likely won’t work. It’ll probably want to format it, which will wipe the data.

My WD My Cloud 4TB gave up, after I (silly- foolishly) tried to branch it to another adapter with higher voltage. After that the My Cloud worked randomly, but now it just stays on red and doesn’t boot properly, even though you hear the disc working. The data are all still there and I can read them on Linux. (I have all my music for Sonos on it, but that is no problem, I have it all backuped).

So, my main question is: does anybody know what will happen if I put the harddisk into another, identical WD My Cloud single bay case? Is there any chance that this would work without having to reformat the entire disc?

There are two different versions of the single bay/single drive My Cloud model. Each version has slightly different hardware and uses a different firmware that cannot be interchanged.

The first generation single bay/single drive My Cloud can be identified by the use of v3.x or v4.x firmware, and with a P/N number on the bottom of the My Cloud enclosure of “-00”. The second generation uses firmware v2.x and has a P/N number of “-10”. If you can find a My Cloud enclosure that is the same generation as the one you currently have, then should should be able to transfer the My Cloud hard drive from one enclosure to another. This assues the My Cloud hard drive is not damaged or corrupted.

Just wondering … if you transplant the hard drive into a identical WD My Could enclosure

where is the information for the user / shares / folders / permissions stored ?

i don’t think that’s stored on the hard drive or logic board … but in the nand flash memory of the My Clouds processor.

if that’s the case, the new My Cloud enclosure might not be able to see any of the data on the transplanted drive.

just a theory

On the single bay/single drive My Cloud devices everything is stored on the hard drive. If one looks at the various unbrick methods they’ll see that they are pushing files to the hard drive. When the My Cloud is powered on it reads the operating system files from the hard drive.

Because there are two different sets of hardware (and firmware) for the single bay/single drive My Cloud units, one needs to make sure they are transplanting the hard drive into the same generation enclosure as their previous original enclosure.

ok. well, will be interesting to see how the OP gets on with the transplant operation.