DATA RECOVERY
So you’ve got a continuous light of white led after an apt-get update command and you can’t even hard reset your device? Don’t panic there is a solution for this.
If you read through this GUIDE at the end you will be able to successfully recover all your data stored on your WD My Cloud device and even get it back working but it will cost a bit.
First you need to disassembly the box and get the hdd out in one piece. Follow this video tutorial for disassembly: tutorial . I assume you already lost your warranty so don’t worry if you break the case (I broke it a bit too but it is still in one piece). You won’t need it anyway in the future. So you have successfully got the hard drive out from the box now you just need to attach it to your normal PC. You can connect it with a standard SATA cable. Now if you boot up your Windows 8.1 OS you will see that the hard drive is already recognized as RAW disk which is good. Don’t even try to browse or format it because it will cause irreversible changes and you won’t be able to recover your data after that. Rather download the following FREE software: TestDisk . This will help you recover your data to another disk. It is pretty straight forward so I won’t explain here how to do this. Just follow this guide: Step by Step GUIDE . And that’s it. All your data are restored and you are ready to move forward to a more professional NAS system.
PROFESSIONAL REUSE OF THE HDD
First of all I was a bit upset and panicked because I thought I will lose all my 2.7 TB of data but followed the above instructions and fortunatelly was able to recover all my data. So I decided to build my own NAS that is more reliable but I kept the 3TB WD hdd which I think is one of the best hdd-s in the market at the moment so yes why not to reuse it. But before started to reuse it I formatted it to NTFS and created two partitions: 1) 100GB (System) and 2) 2,9 TB (data). Then I moved back all my data to partition 2.
I decided not use the old parts (case and chipset) because I don’t wanted another situation where I can’t hard reset my device. So forgot linux and moved to a more reliable operation system: Windows. For this I needed some extra parts:
- Gigabyte GA-C1037UN-EU ( LINK) - 75$
- Kingston 2x2 GB RAM (1333 Mhz) - 37$
- Chieftec ELOX IX-03B - 26$
- Pico PSU (120W) and a Power adapter - 60$
I have put the parts together along with the WD HDD and installed Windows 8.1 Professional. And now I have a reliable NAS with the following features:
- uTorrent WEB UI
- FIle server
- Plex Media Server
- Remote Desktop terminal with Graphical User Interface (against the lame SSH Putty and WinSCP combo)
And finally but most importantly I can now install whatever I want and I am not restricted to the original factory defaults. And I would bet that this NAS will last longer than half year against my original WD My Cloud.
