After about 3 years of use, my My Book Live became completely inaccessible. I have been trying to resurrect it for a couple of days, but eventually gave up and connected the disk through a SATA to USB adapter to transfer the data. The laptop I connected the drive to runs Win 10. Upon connecting the drive Win 10 threw an error message and asked if I wanted to format the disk, to which I said no. So it looks like Win 10 on its own will not do the trick as it doesn’t seem to know how to deal with those partitions.
I started googling for a utility that would allow me to access the data and copy it off to another drive and found a lot for the price of $70. I don’t know any of those companies and I don’t feel I should be paying this much for what I am trying to do. Is there a utility like that, that WD offers to their users to access the data from the disk?
You shouldn’t need to pay ANYTHING for a tool that can read EXT4 partitions.
At the very least, you can run just about any distro of Linux Live on your PC (don’t even need to install it – just run from media) – and access your disk and copy it.
So I tried that and while I got off to a good start, running Ubuntu Live, it does seem to have a problem mounting the partition. After plugging in the drive it throws the exception. I went to Disks and can see the disk and the partitions there, but clicking Mount from there results in the same error.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!
Eeek. That typically indicates a corrupt partition table.
I would suggest spending time in Google with that error message… (mount “missing codepage or helper program” “ext4”)
and see if there are suggestions out there on recovering the data.
