Plain Linux

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

I’m trying to mod my WD MyCloud 2TB to run a “plain Debian”, that is, a system I can install any aptitude packages on without weird dependency errors involving the wd-nas package.

I don’t need (WD-) cloud acces, apple compatibility (itunes, time machine) or a fancy web frontend (although it’s really nice).

My current goal is a system without “wd-*” packages that offers SSH access after boot. From there I should be able to do the rest (of my goals that are off topic).

As I already mentioned in a different thread, I’m having some trouble modding the device. In most cases, I end up with a system that seems to boot loop. Maybe it’s not actually boot looping but

  • the system does not acquire an IP address
  • the white LED and the network status LED constantly turn off for a moment after about half a minute
  • no log files are written to the RAID partition

What I have to do is write the image file you can find in this forum to the drive and start over again. Quite annoying.

Does anyone have any experience that may help? Does anyone know what the unknown partitions are for? I have made my own backup image after applying the one you can find here and upgrading to the latest firmware. If I restore that, again: “boot loop”. Annoying! What am I doing wrong? (dd-ed the first 5GB of the drive to an image - just like the one available for download) Can anyone explain / understand / provide any hint concerning the boot sequence of the device?

@ WD team: Would you mind providing a “vanilla Debian image” for the WD MyCloud?

2

In order to get plain vanilla Debian on this box it looks necessary to create an uImage.

WD is oblidged to publish everything necessary to do that, but unfortunately their cookbook is as buggy as the firmware itself and therefore I have not yet been able to do that.

Imho it would be much easier to cross compile on a PC for the armhf platform, but this did not work for me either.

There has been a single post where someone wrote to have done it, but he did not come online for 3 weeks now.

http://community.wd.com/t5/WD-My-Cloud/WD-My-Cloud-GPL-Source-Code/m-p/688397

1 Like
3

Thanks for your reply! I had already noticed that thread. If I will be successfull in compiling my own firmware (or even try :wink: ), I’ll let you know.

A vanilla Debian would be nice, but my real goal is to be able to install virtually any aptitude package, that is: solving dependency problems. So for me it would still be an option to start off with a stock firmware. But never knowing if my next would lead to a soft brick is quite a bummer. :wink:

4

Be warned: Most of your Linux knowledge valid on PC platforms is plain wrong for MyCloud with armhf CPU.

Furthermore the firmware does some system tweakings that up to now nobody could explain.

Maybe those are not a bugs but marvelous features …