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themaddoctor / linux-mybook-tools

tools for opening some encrypted WD My Book drives in linux
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Fast Blinking Red Light MyCloud WDBCTL0040HWT-10 with damaged WD40EFRX #91

Open Yetisimo opened 1 year ago

Yetisimo commented 1 year ago

I have a WD MyCloud model WDBCTL0040HWT-10 that boots up to a fast blinking red light. After swapping the old internal WD40EFRX drive into a good working identical MyCloud I got the same fast blinking red lights. It seemed like the internal WD40EFRX drive might be damaged.

I placed the WD40EFRX into a USB external drive enclosure and connected it to a computer running the Ubuntu 23.04 but it only showed up as VLI Manufacture String VirtualDisk with no size or volumes.

Pulling the SATA controller board off of the WD40EFRX hard drive revealed some dark areas on the board and a couple of the pins on the drive connector that touch the board were darker than normal. I carefully cleaned up the pins on the drive connector and attached a good SATA board from another WD40EFRX. I then placed the drive back into the USB external drive enclosure and connected it to the Ubuntu computer. This time it recognized all of the volumes on the drive but spent a long time on the Job: MountingFilesystem. Eventually it gave up trying and the drive disappeared from Ubuntu. I tried several times with the same results.

So my question is whether this sounds like something that could be repaired? I have a lot of family pictures and things on the drive that I would really like to save. I have experience with Windows machines mostly and I have done a fair amount of hardware repairs over the years but I am pretty much lost in the world of Linux but I am willing to learn. If anyone would be willing to help guide me that would be great.

themaddoctor commented 1 year ago

You can't swap boards like that. They usually have different firmware. Some people can swap the chips from one board to another.

I suggest you pay a data-recovery expert to fix it for you. I am not such a person.

Yetisimo commented 1 year ago

Thanks for the reply. On windows machines I have successfully swapped boards on dead hard drives before as long as I used the exact same model board and was then able to access the data.

It has worked to some extent in this case since the Linux machine can now recognize the partitions on the drive but it fails to fully mount.

I was hoping that the mounting problem was something along the lines of what was being discussed here but if not I still appreciated your reply.

Thank you for your time.

themaddoctor commented 1 year ago

If the drive encrypts each partition separately, then it is not the sort of thing that this project can address. The drives I know about were made before the MyCloud came out.

The encryption information is probably stored on a chip on the drive's board.

Sorry.

u2n commented 1 year ago

Guys, this post indicates the data is not encrypted.

However this product page shows two FW versions, and related posts indicate that encryption may have been an option in the later one.

In any case, it appears that if encryption was never manually selected (if that was even an option), the data will be stored unencrypted, ready for recovery. This assumes the drive is still functional and filesystems not damaged.

Ever the optimist, I would hope the simple mount method would work. (Be prepared to locate the filesystem(s).)

If the first link above turns out to be wrong and there really is hardware encryption, then apologies for a useless post!