How to salvage your data from a failed WD My Cloud?

hey guys my name is nikonj and welcome back to the channel so today we are going to do a different sort of a video normally i do unboxings and reviews of uh various products but uh today i am going to do something a little different for you guys so i have been one of the early adopters of network attached storage so to speak or nas drives and um i have been using the wd my cloud for almost nine eight years or so now so i initially got this in 2012 if i'm not wrong um for the early part of the decade it worked really nice for me i did not face any issues but for the past couple of years i had been facing issues with it where it would be powered on but uh it would not be detected over the network i had to you know reboot it for it to work and then about a month ago it decided to die so normally the led light that we have in the front stays solid blue when it is powered on and it's working but uh in my case the led was completely red it was uh it was a solid red so i contacted wd uh since the drive was very old the warranty was obviously out and uh they basically could not do anything in this regard because they don't really you know provide any services for data recovery or any sort of thing as well so i checked on the internet to see what all can be done with this particular drive whether i could somehow salvage the data i did not find a lot of information i did find some videos on how to dismantle it some videos talking about something which is completely different i decided to let it be and just work off the you know usb hard drives that i have and i've been using but then i realized that there was some data that was only on this which i did not have a backup off on any of my drives and that got me again researching on how i can salvage the data from this right because it was not getting detected anyways so it took me what six seven hours over the weekend to you know research on how this can be done i watched maybe a dozen or so videos but i did not find any video where everything was there in one place so i decided to make this for you guys so that you have all the information in one place and you can probably benefit out of it if you have this piece of junk which it is now and if you want to salvage your data from it or maybe you want to do anything else with it so keep watching first let's go ahead and dismantle this drive i've already done that i put this back together just uh to show this to you guys again on video so let's get into that and then i'll take you through the process of how you can recover your data what software i use and everything else in between so keep watching okay so here we go this is the drive um this is the led light that i was talking about it normally should stay solid blue if it's working properly in my case what was happening was that it was a solid white for a very long time it used to flash white for a while and then go completely solid red so from what i read on the internet this can be because of two major reasons one the firmware on the nas itself has completely break or the drive itself is not working properly and the data on the drive is you know basically corrupt so uh we'll go ahead and basically speak about both the possible cases first let's go ahead dismantle this and see how we can recover or you know basically extract the uh three terabyte hard drive that we have in this by the way so yeah let's go ahead and check that before we do um i'll quickly show you the back of this as well we have a usb 3.0 port over here we have the lan port and obviously the power cord is plugged in right at the bottom uh this is basically a shell sort of a design like a taco shell the white uh portion the plastic white portion that we have here basically sits like a taco shell and uh the rest of the enclosure is just placed inside uh let me go ahead grab a credit card because that is what we would need to open this up you can use um one of the guitar picks if you have a sturdy one you can use a spudger as well but yeah the head of that spudger would need to be really really flat and you know really thin so let me grab a card right here we go we have the card with us just place it like this and again i have already opened this so this is just for demonstration what you would need to do is you would need to place your card between this white portion and the metal sort of looking portion right here in the slit and basically veg it a bit because there are certain clips inside so you would need to make sure that you are basically getting those clips apart a little bit once you've done that and your card is fairly fairly inside just with both your thumbs place your fingers on either side on the metal portion not on the white because that would be counterproductive just push it up a little bit and then slide it outward what it would do it would remove it from the clips and it would slide it out just a little bit you would need to repeat this process on the other side to get all the clips out so i'll quickly do that here all right we have the card in push it up push it out and it should start sliding out once it is done just hold this from the back hold the shell just move it out so what i did in my case was i completely broke the pins off because i did that a little too hard probably but um i'm not going to use this drive anyway if in case you want to salvage it maybe change the drive that's there inside then yeah please be very careful with that so as you guys can see this has a three terabyte wd red drive which is again a nas drive and the major difference between uh nas drive and any normal hard drive that you use is the fact that the nash drive is rated for 24 hours of continuous use uh you can you know basically keep on running it and it would not be a problem with normal hard drives it is recommended to go ahead and at least reset uh you know reboot them shut them down for a while stop using them for a while because with a nas the companies make sure that you know they are rated for prolonged use because there are times where your nas would not power off for maybe weeks or months at a time right with a normal hard drive don't do that it would you know cause all sorts of problems okay so to get this out we have two little pins over here in which the hard drive rests all you need to do is push it from the side and it should basically swing out just a little bit for you to you know pull it out just like this you would hear uh you know click sort of a sound when you do that don't be afraid of that it's not going to break anything because that's how it is designed now keeping this aside what we have here is basically the motherboard of this drive and then an enclosure around it and as you guys can see the interface at the back is right here the motherboard is basically what has the firmware for the drive on it it is what keeps you know the data cycling and everything so let's go ahead remove this to remove the motherboard from this basically all you need is a phillips head screw or a screwdriver actually sorry just finding the right screw and i got it so again please be very careful with this in case you want to reassemble the drive and use it again in future make sure you know where everything goes just three screws we have the screws out now just pull this towards yourself and this should bring it out as you guys can see this is the interface where the drive connects to this to the sata interface of your nas drive this is the little processor we have here and the other resistors and you know the capacitors for this but again right now this is not useful let's keep that aside we have three posts in this uh three metal posts on which this rests again keep these very safe in case you want to use this drive again in future now coming to these little feet or whatever you want to call them uh there are four of them around the drive okay so if in case you just want to salvage your data you don't really need to remove these just connect this to you know your computer and just transfer the data over if in case you want to salvage the drive user drive in maybe an external drive enclosure or you want to put this as an extra drive in your computer the sata base that you have in your computer then yeah you would need to remove these feet and the entire enclosure as well so this is a different uh sort of a screw it's a pentalobe screw i believe uh if i'm not wrong so let me go ahead and take that head up i think this should do it nope that one i think i got it now yep got it one's done there goes the second one and there goes the third okay now we have a metal bracket over here as well let's go ahead and remove that as well and i guess the last one is right here oh dear god this tight which machine was having a bad day when it screwed this in no okay that's not coming up okay i'll try and remove this maybe a little later let me go ahead and show you guys how i can or how you can connect this to your computer and get the data of it okay before we start let me quickly show you uh this is the drive that i'll be using to back up all the data that i have on the nas or the wd red drive that i took out of the nas basically this is again a product from wd the wd my passport this is the five terabyte drive let's go ahead and open it because we would need this right away there we go compact little thing a little thick though because this has again a five terabyte drive inside some paperwork and the usb cable to connect the drive all right let's go ahead and now connect the nas or the wd red drive that we took out of the nas again to my computer i'll show you how i do that as well really quickly okay so now that we have the computer open i've already opened that first so i'll go ahead and connect the drive to the sata cables from my computer i've already gone ahead and taken those out uh these are keyed so they are only going to go in one way you need to connect these to the sata ports that you have on the drive right here so cable number one goes in and cable number two again it's keyed would go in only one way goes in something like this so make sure that your computer is powered off when you do this because a lot of times if you do this when your computer is running either the computer is not going to pick up the drive or you may cause some issues because most drives are not hot swappable you cannot just do that on the fly as you go so please keep that in mind and now we are going to power the computer on and i've also plugged in the new usb drive i've got so it's plugged into the usb 3.0 port that i have at the front now let me show you the software that i'm going to use all right so while my computer is powering on um i thought i will tell you guys a little bit about the drive and what we're going to do so first and foremost the drive itself is in an ext4 format which is a linux based format right if you connect it directly to your windows computer your computer is not going to be able to read the data of it because that is not a format that windows natively you know supports or recognizes in your disk management the drive may show up as a raw partition and again it's not able to read any data of it it might show up in my computer with your c drive and your d drive and any other drive that you might have on the computer but when you try and open it it would give you an error saying that this particular drive is not recognized you need to format it before you can go ahead and use it okay so for that there are a couple of ways the one that worked for me was using a third-party tool which can read the ext for format in windows all right so there were a couple that i came across linux reader was one of them and there was one more which was a mini tool partition sort of a thing so those did not really work uh linux reader completely you know gave up on trying to read the hard drive itself the mini partition 2 did read the drive but it took the drive into recovery mode and all the files that it was recovering for me had recovered in front of them not the original file names and since i have 2.7 terabytes of data in this trying to decipher between those two files or you know actually all of the files with recovered in front of the name and you know then a big long string would have been an absolute nightmare the one that worked for me was a software from the company paragon software which is linux file system for windows okay so when you open the software it would show you your volume if it is in an ext4 format it may be unmounted so you have to click on the mount button and make sure you're mounting it in read only mode because again it's an ext format so uh you know your computer would not be able to right do it and this particular software is available for a 10-day free trial mine shows seven days i've already used these uh this for you know three days already but this is basically a paid software it is available for a 10-day free trial if in case you want to use them so as you guys can see my drive is now showing up in ext4 format and if we go ahead into the drive it shows all my data the way the folder structure was originally there it's all there so that's wonderful let's go ahead and copy this this is the my passport drive that i just connected the one that i just unboxed for you we'll create a folder for all the data that's there in it open it and paste so in my case again um it's 2.7 terabytes of data that i have in here so it's going to take a while for it to copy all the data over but in your case if you want specific files off of it you can go ahead select only those specific files and move them over without moving anything else so there you go guys i hope you found this video useful if in case you have any suggestions or anything that you know you did which i did not or maybe this did not work for you let me know in the comments below if you found this video useful if you want to see more content like it hit the like button share it with any of your friends who might be facing an issue with the my cloud drive or any of the nas offerings that wd has this method should work and subscribe to the channel until next time take care and stay safe

Channel: nikunj muglani

Views: 137,307

Keywords: WD, MyCloud, NAS, Bricked, salvage, recover, retrieve, data, solidredlight, failedNAS

Id: FmfygEfWuNM

Length: 19min 21sec (1161 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 04 2021