For the benefit of anyone trying this, swapping out the HDD for a totally generic, off-brand SSD worked fine:
Partition table was MBR (didn’t test GPT)
Created a single ExFAT partition that was the full size of the SSD minus 4GB to leave unallocated space for the firmware to put its files
The WiFi password will be the 8 characters after the first 4 characters of the drive serial number. e.g. “123456789ABCDEF” will result in a password of “56789ABC”.
If everything seems to work but it won’t accept your password, you’ll have to extract the configuration file from the hidden (unallocated) partition area as described by “mikehelps” earlier in this thread on June 19, 2019 so you can see what password the unit configured itself with
Install took around 10 minutes while the drive light blinked slowly
Successful completion left the drive light on steadily and the unit broadcasting its “My Passport” WiFi network.
Unsuccessful completion left the unit turned off or all the LEDs blinking rapidly together
In my case, everything worked despite being a cheap, off-brand SSD and the web admin page showed the model as a “My Passport Wireless SSD” with the correct drive size
I could be wrong about this, but it seemed like the process failed if the battery pack was not plugged in. It could’ve been a different issue, but try plugging it in if you’re doing it without the battery
I’m starting to wonder if there’s multiple revisions of the board. The YouTube video that I saw shows a 2TB hard drive with blue system board and the one I’m trying to repair has a 1TB hard drive and green system board. I have a 2TB Gen 1 and working 2TB Gen 2 I bought alongside the 1TB Pro. I’m trying to piece together this whole thread, but there’s a few holes that don’t make any sense to me. As I mentioned i wonder if it has to do with the fact I’m working on has a different hardware configuration with upgrades we don’t know about.
tl;dr no matter what I do, with other WD hard drives (including one with the same model number that came out of the system, WD10JPVX) and a Kingston SSD, all it does is go to recovery mode. There’s nothing about this outside of a blurb in the manual yet no mention of it here on this thread (or the internet from what I can tell). Tried different SD cards and respective formats, still nothing.
I don’t have a UART tool and would not mind purchasing one (I might have something in a box somewhere, not sure) but not entirely sure the best model and as mentioned the correct ports to use on the board. That being said, here’s a list of observations I’ve found while trying to get it work with no avail. I’ve tried everything in this thread except the UART tool, any custom work and using dd to copy the last 4GB to a hard drive.
I have used diskpart clean on both regular and my 2TB pro. The regular one will not boot if memory serves but the Pro will. The Pro’s dashboard shows what appears to be the first hidden partition as it shows a space <1GB. You cannot upgrade the firmware from the dashboard without the correct partitions but the SD card method, not in recovery, works fine. I don’t recall if this method works on the regular model, I want to say it did but then reboots to a failure (as it can’t read a disk with no partitions).
If I power it up, it flashes all lights indicating a hardware failure.
If I power it up and boot into recovery mode, all lights blink slowly. 3 times and then 1 time for a few seconds. If I pop the SD card out all lights turn off except for the WiFi light.
The SD card and USB drives appear to have the dirty bit set when plugging them into a Windows PC. Any CHKDSK will find no errors.
If I leave it sitting in recovery mode for a few minutes, all the lights turn off except for the WiFi and HDD lights to which they blink in a random but consistent pattern. If the hard drive is spun down, which is typically when it happens, it does not spin back up.
I don’t quite understand why formatting the drive from a PC does anything. It’s not readable from the Wireless Pro in either mode as the boot sector is misaligned. This might explain why the drive shows as not being partitioned on USB and the “NAS bug.” The device can’t read the created partition and thus pulls up one of the hidden partitions on the dashboard.
If I attempt to use any disk, including none, I can get it to recovery mode with the same results. If I pop in the failed disk it came with, I get the hardware failure instead.
I’ve tried 4 different hard drives I have laying around and an SSD with no progress.
Probably a few other things I’m missing but I’m curious as to why the process has been working then but no longer now. I’d like to get the 1TB drive working but I could easily hold onto it for parts at the moment, the battery does seem to hold a decent charge.
