WD My Book Live

mccrum · 2 Sep 2013 at 13:42

Hi. I have 2 WD My Book Live's that both failed within 48 hours.

I have taken the drive out of one of the enclosures, (WD30EFRX), and put it into a SATA HDD USB dock.

The drive is showing up healthy in Disk Utility on my Mac and in Administration Tools on my PC but I am unable mount the drive to view the files.

Is there anyway I can easily recover the data off the drive? I have been quoted £400 by a number of different companies.

Dervious · 2 Sep 2013 at 16:04

I can't offer any specific advice on data recovery, but it's a coincidence that I was installing a Mybook Live for a customer last night. This is the second one that I`ve setup, and both have been attached to Virgin "Super"hubs. For some reason the WD Link software fails to find the Mybook device on the network, despite the drive being accessible "manually".

No problem when I tested it on my TP Link router at home.

JonJ678 · 2 Sep 2013 at 17:59

The drive is formatted as ext4 with an unusual blocksize (64k iirc). So you can mount it as ext4. OSX may or may not know how to do this. £400 doesn't sound like a good deal.

@Dervious, perhaps you should blame the virgin hub then.

Dervious · 2 Sep 2013 at 21:11

JonJ678 said:
@Dervious, perhaps you should blame the virgin hub then.

I certainly was muttering about it last night. I know I got it working when I setup one up earlier in the year, but I can't quite remember what I did !

mccrum · 3 Sep 2013 at 11:19

JonJ678 said:
The drive is formatted as ext4 with an unusual blocksize (64k iirc). So you can mount it as ext4. OSX may or may not know how to do this. £400 doesn't sound like a good deal.

@Dervious, perhaps you should blame the virgin hub then.

Tried using Paragon extFS for Mac to read ext4 drives. Picked up nothing

JonJ678 · 3 Sep 2013 at 17:50

Can't help you there as I don't have a mac. Debian can read the drive fine, but as the my book live runs debian, that's no great surprise.

Your easy option is reformat then restore from backups.