Evening, just passed by and seen your message.
OK, so you can see your Linux WD filesystem. As well as the filesystem you have used to boot into a linux Distro (You talked of both Ubutnu and Debian…they are discretely different distros philosophically, although Ubuntu is a commercial variant of Debian…so under the covers very very very similar…I’m drifting off the point…)
So you have issued a df -h to see the mounted filesystem allocations in a human friendly format (what the -h flag means).
You will see the filesystem of your Linux OS. you need to create a new temp filesystem to mount the WD filesystem with your data into… issue from command line mkdir /mnt/wdcloud that means make a directory from the root level of the OS called /mnt(mount)/wdcloud(a unique name). That is now an unmounted but created filesystem. It is present but empty. What you now need to do is to identify the area on the WD CLoud where your data is and mount that under your new filesystem /mnt/wdcloud. Hope I’m making sense…
issue blkid which tells your your attached HDD UIDs and their letter assignation. Hopefully…
Also issue _ fsdisk -l _ which again should give you a hint to what your HDD letter assignation is.
You are looking for something like /dev/sda or /dev/sdb or /dev/hba…it will be something like that (although it may differ on a thumbdrive…I’ve never booted from them so dunno).
The fsdisk should also be feeding you details on exactly what partitions on e.g. /dev/sdb you need. It should report something like (below for a 750Gb HDD):
Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 * 2048 499711 497664 243M 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 501758 1465147391 1464645634 698.4G 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 501760 1465147391 1464645632 698.4G 8e Linux LVM
_ You _ will see a boot sector (/dev/sdb1?), a mirrored OS partition (/dev/sdb2 and /dev/sdb3?), and then an unmirrored data partition. (/dev/sdb4?). You can tell which is which by the size of the partition. It’ll be bleeding obvious which is the data partiton. My gut feeling is you will be looking a /dev/sdb4 but happy toi be proven wrong.
Now mount that data partion on the WD Cloud to your newly created filesystem mount point.
_ mount -r -t ext4 /dev/sdb4 /mnt/wdcloud _ This mounts as read only, in Linux filesystem type ext4 your data partition in the created filesystem mountpoint. ***ensure you do the read only so you don’t write to the partiton and lose data*** ***change the /dev/sdb4 to match whatever text string your data partition is called***
Issue _ df -h _ to see the WD Cloud partition mounted and the filesystem size and both Gb & % free space
_ cd /mnt/wdcloud _ change directory into your mountpoint.
_ ls -l _ to view the files. use _ cd /mnt/wdcloud/xxxxx _to navigate around the directories where xxxx relates to names of directories in your data.
You can now use an ftp program, or drag and drop or whatever mechanism you favour (hint hint ftp it), to copy data off the moutned read-only filesystem to your new and connected external HDD.
I said right at the start that you don’t need to learn linux. You just need to issue a few commands, identify the data partition name and pull data off. The above achieves that for you. Once data transfer is complete, be nice to the system and your data…
Open a second terminal window.
On the first terminal window issue _ df -h _ to check the filesystem as it was at the start,
_ cd /mnt/wdcloud _
_ rm -r * _ recursively remove all files and directories from this mount point. Will take a little time. i.e. delete your data
_ cat /dev/zero >nosuchfile; rm nosuchfile _ This now fills your freshly deleted free space (which still has readable data upon it) with zeros. Will take maybe 4 hours per Tb. It then fills the filesystem by catenating a zero written to every possible byte into a new file called “nosuchfile”. That file grows and grows as zeros are appended to it. The filesystem will then fill up and hit 100% allocated physical space and that proces will keel over. Then the system sees your second command and removes that file called “nosuchfile”.
The above will lock up the first terminal window interface during command processing. Issue in the second terminal window regular _ df -h _ to see the filesystem gradually filling and filling.
Once it hits 100% and then deletes the “nosuchfile” file…do it again to write zeros over deleted zeros.
_ cat /dev/zero >nosuchfile; rm nosuchfile _
So in another 10 - 12 hours for a 4Tb device, you are done. Be nice…unmount the WD Cloud filesystem and log off.
_ umount /mnt/wd _
_ df -h _ shows the mountpoint is now gone.
_ shutdown now _ does what it says on the tin.
Unplug the HDD and box it up ready for i) return for RMA or ii) use in a PC (just reformat and rebuild coz the disk could be OK…check with a disk surface integrity checker forst of course). or iii) put a hammer to it.
Depending on your distro, some of the above command &/or flags may sublty differ, but it’s good for Debian based Linux versions. You’ll have to google the subtle changes if any are required.
My disclaimer…the above does and should work…if you do it correctly. If you hit a problem, then perhaps mount without the read only flag. It also depends on the physical condition of your disk. If that is shagged, then I’ve wasted a lot of time writing this out. End of.
Oh… and then you can buy me a beer.
Good luck R4M
