I need your help to recover the data from my My Book Duo with 2 drives in RAID 1.
The device shows a yellow/orange heartbeat LED.
When I run the WD diagnostics, both drives pass the tests and SMART status is OK, but the My Book Duo enclosure itself reports an error.
Windows cannot access the My Book Duo anymore – the drive does not mount and is not visible as a volume.
I removed both HDDs and tested them individually with SMART tools. Both drives are healthy.
However, when I connect the drives directly via SATA‑to‑USB adapters, Windows and recovery tools cannot detect any partitions or file systems on them.
I read that My Book Duo uses a proprietary RAID header (and possibly encryption), so the drives cannot be accessed directly outside the original enclosure.
This makes me think that the My Book Duo enclosure/controller might be defective.
Is there any way to access the data again, or to rebuild the RAID 1 outside the enclosure?
Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Did you refer to Linux? I have not tried Linux yet… I am not so familiar with Linux, to mount a disc…
Maybe I can test it within the next days, after i can setup a linux system.
There are tools to mount Linux drives to Win devices. Many do file recovery as well. You’ll need a USB enclosure or dock to mount the drive unless you have an extra bay inside your PC. If your NAS was set to Raid 5, you’d need the paid version and have to mount all drives. Not sure it will read the one drive of a mirror but the software is free.
Make sure you get the proper version for your device. Unclear if it will read past the “proprietary Raid Header”. Won’t read encrypted.
There are many other recovery tools out there. Some are free, some are “free to try”, some get very expensive.
If both disks pass SMART tests and are readable individually, the “heartbeat failure” is often the enclosure’s RAID controller or backplane rather than the drives themselves.
Before trying recovery software, connect each drive directly to a SATA port or a basic USB-to-SATA adapter and check whether Windows or Linux sees the raw partitions. If the Duo was configured as RAID 1, don’t initialize or format either disk if Windows prompts you, because that usually just means it doesn’t understand the filesystem or RAID metadata. Linux is useful here not because it’s magical, but because it ignores many of the assumptions Windows makes about foreign disks and lets you verify whether the data is actually intact before you touch the array.
The orange LED and missing volumes point to a faulty enclosure controller, while the proprietary RAID header & encryption block direct SATA access.You can try swapping the drives into another working My Book Duo unit first. If that fails, seek professional utilities or specialists following guides about recover data from a corrupted hard disk to reconstruct this custom RAID 1 array. Avoid repeated drive scans to prevent extra damage to your intact disks.
