If you still have a warranty, this does not apply to you! Submit a support ticket with WD instead of trying this!
You will also be trying all this at your own risk! No one except yourself will be responsible if you turn your MPWP (My Passport Wireless Pro) into a paper weight!
**
WARNING: I tried replacing the hard drive with a Samsung EVO 840 SSD on 2017-08-20 and the firmware restore script had issues and it just looped. DO NOT TRY THIS unless you connect to the UART and have an understanding on how arm works and/or hardware hacking.
**
Now that is out of the wayā¦ Iām planning on messing around with the official firmware and extending it. I was thinking about doing Gentoo instead but decided not to compile since there was that battery thing with the first gen that seems to be fixed with a firmware patch and I rather not deal with all thatā¦ Anyway, before playing around I wanted to recover on a different hard drive, that way I know if stuff was in internal memory or if itās on the hard drive.
What Iāve learned so far thatās related to recovering or replacing the hard drive:
The serial console to see whatās going on/troubleshoot is really easy to attach without soldering. The standard 3v3 - 115200 settings worked for me on the SOC connection.
The OS is on the hard drive.
The initial wifi password is tied to the last 8 characters of hard drive serial number. So if youāre replacing the hard drive with a different one, please write it down or take a picture with your phone (what I did).
I did this on a 320GB HD that Iām planning on using for awhile before I eventually switching back to the 2T drive so I know you can go smaller, doubt thereās restrictions on going largerā¦
I thought I would share this info in case anyone else wants to play around or theyāre unlucky and their hard drive die (please refer to first line of my post).
Step 1 - Download the firmware from WD https://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?g=235&lang=en
Step 2 - Format a SD card with the FAT-32 Filesystem
Step 3 - Create an folder on the SD card with the name āupdateā (without the āā)
Step 4 - Copy the firmware file into the update folder
Step 5 - If youāre switching hard drives, this is the time to do it. I will warn you once again, make a note of the last 8 characters of the hard driveās serial number. This will be your WiFi password.
Step 6 - Insert the SD card into your MPWP
Step 7 - Turn on your MPWP and quickly hold the SD/copy button for about 5 seconds. This will trigger the bootloader to restore the firmward thatās on the sd card.
Step 8 - Have your favorite beverage while the hard drive led flashes, that means itās doing itās thingā¦
Step 9 - The device will reboot once itās done and then youāre good to setup
Edit - Forgot to mention, part of the setup process is formatting your storage area with exfat.
You take off the bottom of the drive, the side the doesnāt have the LEDs. While the following URL doesnāt tell you how to do it, it does show some pictures that should give you an idea on how itās done.
I will try with a Samsung EVO (think an 840?) later today. I want to reformat a laptop I have so I can take out the drive and give it a try before I do it.
Hmmm, It keeps looping from āFound update folderā¦ā to the āsh: bad number.ā Obviously something within the update script is not working properly with a samsung EVO 840 ssd. Maybe I was just lucky with the HDD I tried when I made these instructions. Sorry but I donāt have the time to research this further at the moment (life afk has been crazy busy). Hopefully someone else tries it and documents their work. If so, I will update my original post giving them the credit. If not, I will get a spare SSD (probably a WD one, hopefully it makes it easier) and will go through the update line by line (itās a tar file of binaries and shell script/text files) to get an understanding where it will be throwing the ābad numberā error.
Note: I updated my original post with a warning not to try this.
UART snippet of the error Iām experiencing below
Welcome to WD Korra Recovery
Korra login: updatefw
fw.version
updateVersion 1.03.04
updateMinorVersion 03
RecoverMinorVersion
sh: bad number
Found update folder in /tmp/usbmounts/SDcard
updatefw
fw.version
updateVersion 1.03.04
updateMinorVersion 03
RecoverMinorVersion
sh: bad number
Found update folder in /tmp/usbmounts/SDcard
updatefw
fw.version
updateVersion 1.03.04
updateMinorVersion 03
RecoverMinorVersion
sh: bad number
ā¦
I used a āOSEPP FTDIā board that was in an electronics kit from several years ago. I googled it and besides the official site showing up first, the second result was amazon. Really any board should work as long as you can select the voltage or itās 3v3
The Passport Wireless SSD version is coming out, and from the looks of the support page it is using the same firmware as the non-SSD (Wireless Pro). The release notes for this firmware say:
āWhatās new!
Added support for My Passport Wireless SSDā
I wonder if this makes it possible to swap out the regular drive in the Wireless Pro for an SSD without the error reported by @PuDLeZ above. Thoughts?
Thanks for the heads up! Iāve been waiting for the release before I started modifying the firmware image. I will start looking more into the firmware tonight but a quick glance at it I see that it still checks the hard drive model (file āupdatefwā around line 101). I should be able to try with different drives (HDD and SDD) tomorrow night. If all goes well, I will update tomorrow otherwise I will try to debug the issue over the next few days and then provide an update.
This will be my last update until I actually make some real progressā¦
My custom firmware works with the original HDD but is having an error with a SSD. Iām not sure if it works with other HDDs yet. I recently bought a Samsung Evo 860 SSD (was very recently released) that Iām going to dedicate to getting this working. I will also get a different HDD to dedicate to this project to minimize writing to the SSD until I get it workingā¦
FYI: the custom firmware is throwing the following error.
cat: canāt open ā/sys/block/sd*/device/vendorā: No such file or directory
cat: canāt open ā/sys/block/sd*/device/modelā: No such file or directory
Iām not sure if the SSD doesnāt have these fields or what as the output from the firmware is very limited. I havenāt modified the image too much because my end goal is to barely modify the official image so it will be easy for others to make the same modifications since you shouldnāt always trust things shared on community forumsā¦ Plus, Iām not sure if the admins/mods/wd will like me linking to a modified image of the official firmware, even if I put the disclaimer that people will be using it at their own risk without support from anyone.
Hopefully I can create an image so getting a new drive in the device is as simple of powering on, holding the battery/copy button, and sitting back while it does itās thing. I know I did manually create a replacement drive in Linux but prefer not to go that route since internal PC drives will change the instructions too much, a lot of people arenāt good with math (to calculate positions), secure boot issues, and Linux/command line scares manyā¦
If anyone else has some knowledge and would like to help, please send me a message and I can create a discord channel or something where we can collaborate on getting this done.
It looks have to change firmware script , because in updatefw script from firmware, while check vendor and model, unless vendor == "WD and model == āMy Passport 25AFā or "My Passport 2601, it wonāt update. Although My Passport 2601 means supporting for wireless SSD, still need change with WD hard drive.
After firmware update, wireless pro shows as new wireless pro ssd with 960GB disk.
Note:
MyPassportWirelessGen2_1.04.17.bin not reject updating new vendorās ssd. Instead, change firmware script and md5, then re-tar the bin file doesnāt work.
Nice! Glad you made progress here. Iām just wondering why you need to leave 4 GB unpartitioned space?
And is there progress with the Samsung EVO 860 SSD?
I havenāt tried since the day after I made the post, work and life afkā¦ I do know I can make a replacement hard drive by manually creating all the partitions in Linux, Iām just trying to find a simple way for others to do it. Preferable with a āfirmwareā file so the only things people would really need is a SD card and the device itself.
The 4GB of space is for the OS and stuff. When a drive is in the MPWP/MPWSSD, it automatically doesnāt show the last 4GB of the drive like it would with removing the drive from the device and hooking it up to a PC. For example, one of the first drives I manually created a replacement drive looked like this when I connected it to my PC outside of the device:
Disk /dev/sdf: 298.1 GiB, 320072932864 bytes, 625142447 sectors:
When I connected it to my PC with the drive inside the MPWP enclosure it looked like
Disk /dev/sdf: 294.1 GiB, 315744059392 bytes, 616687616 sectors
The 4GB getās broken up into three devices on the device /dev/sdb (two 512M partitions), /dev/sdc (two 512M partitions), and /dev/sdd (two 1G partitions). My notes I have in my email say:
sdb1 was a backup firmware image/file (MyPassportWirelessGen2_1.01.07.bin)
sdb2 was empty. I think when you gather the log through the webui to send to WD it gets stored here?
sdc1 was bootloader/kernel stuff (think it was just a temp/backup before it gets flashed to the board)
sdc2 is swap
sdd1 the os root filesystem.
sdd2 the os root filesystem.
I believe WD does a similar thing like they did with MyCould where firmware upgrades do one of the partitions so if thereās an issue, it can fail back to the other. If the firmware update goes properly, it uses raid1 to get the partitions in sync.
