myCloud not seeing formatted WD Elements Drive properly

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
1

I’m using the WD myCloud (with latest v04.05.00-334 firmware) and want to back it up to a WD Elements 2TB drive I’ve bought. The myCloud only contains about 250GB of files.

I’ve formatted the Elements drive as NTFS with a single partition and connected it directly to the myCloud. Using the myCloud UI, it recognises a Western Digital Elements 10B8 in the USB menu at the top, but it tells me there’s 0 KB Free of 0 KB. Similarly, when I try to create a safepoint, the USB link recognises a WD drive, but then there is nothing appearing in the drop down list.

From what I can see, everything should be setup to work, but something must be wrong. I would welcome any pointers and/or resolutions!

Thanks, in advance,
Richard

2

Did you use a Windows computer or a Mac computer to format the drive? One suggestion. If used a Mac, try using a Windows PC instead if you can.

Another suggestion. Try formatting the drive in another supported format.

3

Thanks for the suggestions. It was already formatted via Windows, so I tried formatting it as FAT32, but I’m still seeing exactly the same in the myCloud UI :frowning:

Any other suggestions…?

Thanks - again - in advance.

4

Only other suggestions are using the My Cloud Dashboard, eject the USB drive, reboot the My Cloud, wait for it to boot to a blue front LED then reattach the USB drive (if you haven’t tried this already).

Check the drive using a partitioning program to see if it’s MBR disk or GPT disk. Try converting it to the other as a troubleshooting test. There are free partitioning programs like MiniTool Partition Wizard (https://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html) that can be used to partition and format a drive.

If you have given the USB drive a name make sure there are no spaces in the drive name and if the name is a long one, try shortening it down. If it doesn’t have a name try giving it a short name.

5

Already tried this to no avail. :slight_smile:

It’s an MBR disk, but the free version of the the MiniTool Partition Wizard won’t let me change the type.

It was called WDELEMENTS which I’ve shorted to WD2TB and still doesn’t work.

I’ve also tried creating a logical partition (rather than primary), but it makes no difference.
I’ve recreated it as a NTFS drive with a new partition (and shorter drive name), but it makes no difference.

I don’t like giving up, but if we’re out of ideas, I think the Elements drive is heading towards eBay…! :smiley:

6

Not enough to go on… I am looking to see if the Elements series drives use a virtual cd drive, like the Passport drives do, because that is the most likely culprit at this moment in my opinion.

drives that present as multiple devices (which is what the virtual cdrom containing drivers for the drive is accomplished with) do not play nice with the automounting script baked into the mycloud.

When connected to the computer, does the drive present such a virtual CDROM drive?

7

I’m away from my desk today, but from memory it just appears as a removable disk (like any USB memory stick).

Or am I missing something? Could you tell me how to identify whether it’s appearing as a virtual drive?

8

When you plug it in, does it show up in device manager with an additional cdrom drive?

Basically, some of these WD external hard drives will emulate a CDROM that contains some driver software. This emulated cdrom drive causes the problems when attached to a MyCloud.

It can be disabled on a windows box with the smartware software, but meh. I am not a fan of WD doing this.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3835/~/how-to-remove-(disable%2Fhide)-the-virtual-cd-(vcd)-for-windows-or-mac-osx-on-a

9

No. Just as the disk drive itself.

10

Hmm… Not that then…

Are you comfortable with using SSH? Output of dmesg after inserting the drive would be beneficial.

11

Never used it, but happy to try with guidance… But I’m only on Windows, if that makes it a problem.

12

On windows?

Get a copy of PuTTY. You can use it to log into your MyCloud over SSH.

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

Then turn on SSH access on your mycloud.

https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/14460

After that, log in with PuTTY, then plug in the USB drive.

type

dmesg

on the command line.

Collect the last few lines where it blithers on about USB highspeed devices and the like. Highlight the text with the mouse by clicking and dragging over it, then click once. It will look like nothing happened but it copied the text to the clipboard.

Paste it into a reply and let me have a look.

13

There seemed to be quite a bit where it blethered on about USB highspeed devices, so the entire output is available at http://testing.cathedralchoir.org.uk/dmesg.txt

14

Looking at the dmesg output. It looks like the device is found and no problems reported.
next time you SSH into the device.
enter df -h

This will tell us of the device is mounted. You could also try
typing
mkdir /mnt/test
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/test
df -h

This should mount the device and show that it is mounted.

15

Regardless of the output, this remains what I see…
image

WDMyCloud:~# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs          1.9G  642M  1.2G  36% /
/dev/root       1.9G  642M  1.2G  36% /
tmpfs            40M  9.0M   32M  23% /run
tmpfs            40M   64K   40M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs            10M     0   10M   0% /dev
tmpfs           5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/shm
tmpfs           100M  9.6M   91M  10% /tmp
/dev/root       1.9G  642M  1.2G  36% /var/log.hdd
ramlog-tmpfs     40M  9.4M   31M  24% /var/log
/dev/sda4       2.7T  328G  2.4T  13% /DataVolume
/dev/sda4       2.7T  328G  2.4T  13% /CacheVolume
/dev/sda4       2.7T  328G  2.4T  13% /nfs/Handel,GF-IsraelinEgypt(_1
/dev/sda4       2.7T  328G  2.4T  13% /nfs/Kristina
/dev/sda4       2.7T  328G  2.4T  13% /nfs/SmartWare
/dev/sda4       2.7T  328G  2.4T  13% /nfs/TimeMachineBackup
/dev/sda4       2.7T  328G  2.4T  13% /nfs/Public
/dev/sda4       2.7T  328G  2.4T  13% /nfs/Handel,GF-Israeli_20160420134558
/dev/sda4       2.7T  328G  2.4T  13% /nfs/Handel,GF-IsraelinEgypt(CD2)(Th
/dev/sda4       2.7T  328G  2.4T  13% /nfs/Richard
tmpfs           1.0M     0  1.0M   0% /etc/samba/msg.sock

WDMyCloud:~# mkdir /mnt/test
WDMyCloud:~# mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/test
mount: unknown filesystem type 'ntfs'

So… this is telling me it can see it, but it doesn’t like something about the type of drive?

16

I see that the system recognizes the drive. But does not mount the drive.
I tried to mount a ntfs drive in my gen2 My Cloud and it worked fine. So I tried to do the same with the Gen1 My Cloud and I get the same results as you. But I was able to mount the device using the following command.
mount -t ufsd /dev/sdb1 /mnt/test

I don’t know why gen1 My Clouds will not mount. after you mount the device you could type the following command.
dmesg -T |tail
This will show you that the device is mounted as NTFS.

17

I mounted it, and this is the dmesg output:

WDMyCloud:~# dmesg -T |tail
[Sun Jun  2 22:23:49 2019] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI disk
[Mon Jun  3 03:04:49 2019] EXT4-fs (sda4): re-mounted. Opts: user_xattr,barrier=0,data=writeback,noinit_itable
[Mon Jun  3 03:04:50 2019] md: cannot remove active disk sda1 from md0 ...
[Mon Jun  3 03:04:50 2019] md: cannot remove active disk sda2 from md0 ...
[Mon Jun  3 03:04:51 2019] EXT4-fs (sda4): re-mounted. Opts: user_xattr,barrier=0,data=writeback,noinit_itable,init_itable=10
[Tue Jun  4 03:05:01 2019] EXT4-fs (sda4): re-mounted. Opts: user_xattr,barrier=0,data=writeback,noinit_itable
[Tue Jun  4 03:05:02 2019] md: cannot remove active disk sda1 from md0 ...
[Tue Jun  4 03:05:02 2019] md: cannot remove active disk sda2 from md0 ...
[Tue Jun  4 03:05:03 2019] EXT4-fs (sda4): re-mounted. Opts: user_xattr,barrier=0,data=writeback,noinit_itable,init_itable=10
[Tue Jun  4 19:17:07 2019] ufsd: "mount" (sdb1): is mounted as NTFS (without journal)

However, in the wdmycloud UI, it’s still not seeing it in a way in which I can actually use it:
image

I really appreciate your suggestions, and am sorry that something still seems to be hindering matters!

Thanks again…

18

I did another test. I rebooted the My Cloud with the USB device attached. After the reboot
the USB device was mounted. But it did not show in the dashboard.

19

While there’s something satisfying about having made it work technically, it’s somewhat frustrating that I still can’t use the USB drive as an automatic backup for the MyCloud (which is why I started trying to get this to work in the first place!)

Thanks for your help, but I fear the drive will be finding its way to eBay as I thought before we got it mounted! :slight_smile:

20

OK I found the easy solution to the problem. When I formatted the 3tb drive using win10 and ntfs mycloud saw it but said that there were 0tb free. I formatted the drive in ntfs using windows XP and everything worked properly. Mycloud recognized it as a 2.7 tb drive.