If you have already removed the hard drive from the My Cloud enclosure then you can do one of two things. Attach the hard drive to an external USB enclosure/docking cable or docking station. There are many low cost USB devices to attach to an SATA hard drive. Or if you have a desktop computer that has an SATA port, connect the hard drive to the desktop computer’s SATA cable/power cable.
The problem with using Windows to attempt to read or write to the bare My Cloud hard drive is the hard drive is partitioned and formatted for Linux. Windows does not have the appropriate drivers to read Linux drives. There are third party programs one can install to read Linux hard drives, but it is generally easier to simply create a Linux boot disc or use a Linux OS computer to read the hard drive. One can create a Linux boot disc and boot their computer from any one of the many Linux Live CD distro’s. Here is one such popular distro: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/burn-a-dvd-on-windows
Using Linux one can read the various partitions on the My Cloud hard drive. Generally there is one partition that is dedicated to user data files (the Shares). If one can read the user partition they can copy the files off that partition to another hard drive or location.
If one doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive in their PC they can create a USB boot media. Here is one such way to do so: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-ubuntu
There are a number of “unbrick” procedures that one can attempt to recover their My Cloud hard drive. Here is one such thread.
http://community.wd.com/t/guide-how-to-unbrick-your-2tb-3tb-4tb-my-cloud/93336
