Hi to everyone, I have got a WD My Cloud 2TB (single bay), which I use not only to store movies and photos, but also to automaticaly store documents from a network scanner. So I was happy to use this device that allows me to manage users and shares, and to adapt its interface to the needs of the scanner.
Unfortunately the NAS fall down from my desktop. Although the NAS didn’t recognize the disk anymore, I was able to recover most of content before the hard disk definetely died, by unmounting it and connecting it to a PC running Ubuntu Linux.
Because the NAS was working very well, I’d prefer reuse my present NAS instead of puchasing a new one. Therefore, now I’d like to replace the disk, either with a disk of the same type (WD Red 3TB) or with another with more memory. But while recovering the data, I noted that there are several partitions in the disk, with operating system and software I guess.
So, my question is: can I simply buy a new disk and connecting it to the previous hardware? Is there some automatic configuration procedure in the NAS hardware? Or must I manually create the partitions, install the firmware (taking it from where?) and configure it? In this case, is there some WD tool for doing this configurations?
Thanks a lot to everyone who can give me help or some suggestions!
The data partition is either partition 4 (for first gen unit) or partition 2 (for gen2 unit). In either case, it is physically the last partition on the disk.
The other partitions contain operating system and configuration data.
Since it is the last partition on the volume, you can usually clone the drive onto the new one with something like dd, then extend the data partition to fill the remaining space.
Failing that, you can follow one of the debricking guides to set up the new drive fresh, then copy the data over.
Thank you Wierd_w for your kind reply. Unfortunately, the oiginal HDD is defintely dead, I don’t believe to be able to clone it nor to recover any informations about the number of partitions and their size.
My question was just to know if there is something in the MyCloud Hardware to automaticly create the setup (partitions, firmware and the environment) needed for the operation of the NAS. I’m understanding that this configuration is up to me.
Could you please help me to identify where I can find the “debricking guides” you are speaking about?
Thanks, Adriano
Hi to everyone, I’d like to thank a lot Wierd_w for his kind support. Yesterday I’ve finished to restore my WD My Cloud, also replacing the original 2TB hard disk with a new 4TB HD.
The suggestions of Wierd_w helped me to understand how to proceed, and the links to Bennor’s instruction helped me to move the first steps in this process.
I had an unexpected problem that slowed a little the solution: all the instruction said that at the end of copying the disk image, the NAS had to be rebooted until the blue light appears: unfortunately, every time I tried to restart, the LED passed from a quite white light to off state.
Only after two weeks of attempts, I realized that the blue LED was broken: in fact, although the LED appears off, the dashbord is reacheble and the HD is fully operative.
Moreover, I experienced another little problem, because the firmware version I loaded in the NAS did’nt work fine for the configuration of the user: in fact, the NAS wasn’t able to connect to the WD web site in order to configure remote access: for this reason, it wasn’t also able to check if a new version of the firmware is available, so the return message was “This is the most recent version of the firmware.”
Again, after a number of attempts to manually configure the accounts and the remote access, I realized that the firmware wasn’t the latest version. I manually downloaded the latest version and updated the firmware in the NAS. After this operation, the configuration process worked fine.
So, this is the happy end of my history: I spared money by changing only the disk instead of the whole NAS, keeping the original functionality. Thanks a lot to all!
