Good afternoon my friends! After spending several days and countless hours in attempts to “unbrick” my 1st generation WDMyCloud (unsuccessfully) I thought we should all take a moment to make some clarifications so that others may be able to succeed where I have failed.
There are several unbricking procedures I have found in various threads - and I have tried them all unsuccessfully. I think some of the problems that I am facing - and others may face as well - is as follows:
1)The unbricking procedure is not telling you if the .img file that you are downloading will work with GEN1 or GEN2 hard drives.
2)Some files state what the firmware version is, but again is not telling you if it works with a specific hard drive size
3)I have read that you have to follow a different set of procedures if you are trying to unbrick a 1st generation vs a 2nd generation drive.
I am hoping we can come together as a community and outline/clarify specifics when it comes to either unbricking or installing a new drive in our mycloud’s.
I myself have a 1st generation wdmycloud, single bay. It is my understanding that 1st generation models use the v3 and/or v4 firmware. The 2nd generation’s use the v2 firmware.
Can you use ANY drive when replacing your hard drive in the mycloud or does it have to be a WD RED drive? As in my case, I have a stock 6TB WD RED drive that came in my 1st Gen my cloud.
I have tried the restore procedure with several different drives using several different methods and have had no success. The best I got was instead of flashing an “.img” file, I manually had to unzip a “.tar” file and transfer the kernel.img, config.img, and rootfs.img to each individual partition on the drive.
When I booted up - the hard drive actually displayed both the green network traffic LED as well as a green link led. I also heard the drive making seek noises so I knew it was doing something. It eventually ended in a red light and nothing working.
So - what exactly is the difference between an “.img” file and a zipped firmware file that you have to manually extract kernel,config, and rootfs? Does the .img fie contain all these items and manually partitions your drive and puts the files in their respective locations?
I am having a difficult time determining if it is my hard drive that is bad or the mycloud circuit board. I used a brand new hard drive from seagate and attempted these restore procedures to no avail.
My original WDMyCloud RED 6TB hard drive gives me input output errors when i try to unbrick it. I get no errors when using another drive and “flashing” the .img file or manually transferring the other files to each partition, but it too also doesnt boot to a blue light.
So, I am hoping we can start with identifying what specific drives we can use, what specific procedure we should use, and the reason for each code we use.
Some procedures tell you to manually create a gtp table, others do not. Some are saying to set msftdata to on and others are not. Some are saying to format the 4th partition (in my case sda4) to ext4 using gparted, others do not. Also, when these tutorials say to plug your drive back in and wait 5-10min for a blue light, do you plug the drive back into power with an ethernet cable attached or not? Do you have to do a soft 4 second reset or a 40 second reset? Do you have to wait for a blue light to do any of these steps?
If anyone can help me understand this, I would gladly take the time to write a tutorial including screen shots to help others out. I am not a coder by any means and this has been an interesting albeit frustrating experience for me.
I am looking forward to any help anyone can provide and I would love to be able to help get others WDMyCloud’s back online and working!