WD Mybook World Edition Data Recovery

by walter on Jan.11, 2010, under Computing, Linux
Visited 4684 times, 4 so far today

Awhile back, I bought two Western Digital Mybook World Edition 1TB network drives. The first lasted just over a year before it died. The second one went today, taking down my office backup. There’s a redundant backup, so I wasn’t really hurt by the failure but at least this time I was able to use some linux knowledge to recover all the data on it.

The first realization I had a problem with this drive came when I couldn’t turn it off to replace a UPS from which it was powered. After several attempts to turn it off normally, I unplugged it and then found that upon powering again, it wouldn’t restart. The drive spun up, but the blue light wouldn’t turn on and the network port lights remained unlit.

I brought the drive home and took it apart following the instructions here. The case fits together very tight, but with a bit of work this procedure worked.

With the drive removed, I attached it via a SATA to USB cable to my Ubuntu linux computer. These cables are usually available for around $20.

With the drive connected to the USB port, I was hopeful that Ubuntu would mount it automatically, but it didn’t. A new device appeared in Nautilus file manager called “Drive”, but it wouldn’t mount. I’m not too much of a linux command line guy, so for alot of technical things, I rely on Webmin. In webmin I went to Hardware>Partitions on Local Discs. There I saw that the drive was being recognized and had 4 partitions.

The fourth partition is obviously the one holding my data, so I then went to System>File Systems, to mount it. At that point I remembered that I needed to make a directory to mount it to, so I created /mnt/world. Back in Webmin, I added the mount point and to be on the safe side made it read-only. It mounted right away.

Back at Nautilus, I navigated to the mount folder and saw the drive’s folders but I didn’t have permission to view their contents. I closed Nautilus and ran “gksudo nautilus” to start it with root priviledges, but that didn’t let me into those folders either. Back at Webmin, I tried its file manager and was allowed to see the contents of the drive’s folders and was also able to start copying its files onto another external drive. When it was done, I changed permissions of all files and folders so I could easily access them and verified that the data appeared to be intact.

With a World Edition II drive, which contains two hard drives, if you change one drive the system will format and rebuild itself. With a World Edition I drive such as this, I’m not sure that’s the case unless that ability is built into firmware stored on a chip somewhere. I’m seeing tutorials for recovering this kind of drive involving downloading and installing drive images which makes me think it won’t be an automatic process. I’ll be checking with WD before proceeding to rebuild the original drive.

:backup, file transfer, How To

7 Comments for this entry

notSD
May 12th, 2010 on 8:15 am
Damn Desktar from IBM blew up last night… Going to try your ideas hope it works….

Reply
pete
March 22nd, 2010 on 5:52 pm
Walter

i have same problem as dave error came up when i create mount in edit mount screen

Reply
Paul
February 27th, 2010 on 11:41 pm
Dave/Walter,

I am getting the same message. When I look at my WD drive, there are four partitions: a 1.0GB, a 100MB, a 3.0GB and a 996GB. I have been attempting to mount the large one. No luck so far. It was out of a WD MyBook World Edition 1TB (w/rings, not bar lights).

I pretty much get the same error message whether from Webmin or from the cmd line. When I do the dmesg | tail, it says “bad magic number” and “SB validate failed”.

Reply
Dave
February 7th, 2010 on 2:31 am
This is what I used in case you wondered…
sudo mount -t xfs -o rw /dev/sda4 /mnt/world

Thanks, Dave.

Reply
Dave
February 7th, 2010 on 2:17 am
Yes, it was at the mount edit screen… I get the feeling ubuntu doesn’t play nice with xfs.
sda4 is internal. I put the wd inside my rig, because I had the room and the cables…
Anyway, I found some terminal jargon to force ubuntu to read and mount the xfs partition. So happy days! Still have to use webmin to access and copy them.
Again thanks for the write up, was this that put me on the right track to recovery of my files.
Thanks, Dave.

Reply
Dave
February 6th, 2010 on 12:57 pm
Great write up, unfortunately didn’t work for me…

Failed to save mount : Mount failed :

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda4,
missing codepage or helper program, or other error
In some cases useful info is found in syslog – try
dmesg | tail or so

Any ideas?

Dave.

Reply
- walter
  February 6th, 2010 on 4:25 pm
  When did you get the error message? Was it when you tried to save at the “Edit Mount” screen? Also, are you sure sda4 was the right device? On mine, I think that’s the internal drive.
  
  Reply