Hello
I recently screwed my friend's MyBook World Edition (750 GiB) so I had to recover it completely. I didn't know that there should be some system partition, so i formated the whole drive with ext3 and copied many Gigs of stuff on that partition (no undelete was possible).
THERE IS NO OFFICIAL RESCUE PROCEDURE AVAILABLE FROM WESTERN DIGITAL! THIS IS A REAL BIG SHAME!!! I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS PRODUCT!
Gigabit NAS??? FORGET IT!!! It can not use the bandwidth of 100 mbps network… The Gigabit port is just for fun.
After googling the net i found this site and tried this manual: http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/backup-images-of-mybook But it didn't work at all… I also found this how to http://www.ismprofessional.net/pascucci/documenti/mybook/mybook-hacking-en.html, but its about getting a GNU/Debian Lenny on the MyBook… Not the original system. (The friend of mine is NOT Linux compatible :)
From the Debian Lenny how to i realized that the backup images would probably work, but there is also some special boot loader… Or 2 :) and they weren't within the download of original rescue…
I've got this damn thing working by asking another friend to do me a favor… "dd if=/dev/sda of=/somewhere/rescue.img bs=512 count=48194" :) So i had a copy of the space between the start of disk to the start of the first partition.
The steps of recovery
100% Functional for ALL DISK SIZES.
1. Remove the HDD from MyBook World Edition and connect it to your PC. In this manual i refer to the disk as /dev/sda1
cd ~
su root [enter root passwd]
2. Download the rescue files [57 MiB]
wget http://szabados.sk/mybook_we_rescue.zip
unzip mybook_we_rescue.zip
cd rescue
3. Zero fill the first 3 GiB of space on disk
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M count=3000
4. Create the first 3 system partitions
sfdisk /dev/sda < SDA_PTAB
5. Create the last partition at the end of the disk
cfdisk /dev/sda
At the end of the disk there is much free space, create there a PRIMARY partition, set it to be TYPE=fd
This is because this manual is usable for all kind of disks big enough… So you can do this also with a 500G, 750G, 1000G or bigger disk. So the partition at the end is variable size dependent on the disk.
Some Linux distributions do automounting new partitions… So umount them if possible.
umount /dev/sda1
umount /dev/sda3
umount /dev/sda4
6. Format 4th partition with no space reserved for UID 0
mkfs.ext3 -m 0 /dev/sda4
You need about 4 GiB of free space for this rescue procedure, if you do not have enough follow the steps bellow.
You do not have to do this if you have enough free space…
mkdir /mnt/sda4
mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/sda4 -t ext3
cd ..
mv rescue /mnt/sda4
cd /mnt/sda4/rescue
7. Copy the contents of rescue.img to the disk
dd if=rescue.img of=/dev/sda
8. Unpack and copy the contents of the 1. system partition
You'll need cca 3 GiB of free space.
bunzip2 SDA1_IMA.BZ2
dd if=SDA1_IMA.BZ2.out of=/dev/sda1
If you see a message like this: "I/0 or other error, bailing out. Possible reson follows. No space left on device" Follow the "Low Space rescue" described at step 6 and then continue from where you stooped
9. Unpack and copy the contents of the swap [2nd] partition
You'll need cca 100 MiB of free space.
bunzip2 SDA2_IMA.BZ2
dd if=SDA2_IMA.BZ2.out of=/dev/sda2
If you see a message like this: "I/0 or other error, bailing out. Possible reson follows. No space left on device" Follow the "Low Space rescue" described at step 6 and then continue from where you stooped
10. Unpack and copy the contents of 3rd system partition
You'll need cca 1 GiB of free space.
bunzip2 SDA3_IMA.BZ2
dd if=SDA3_IMA.BZ2.out of=/dev/sda3
If you see a message like this: "I/0 or other error, bailing out. Possible reson follows. No space left on device" Follow the "Low Space rescue" described at step 6 and then continue from where you stooped
11. Turn off fsck for all [NON SWAP] system partitions
tune2fs -c -1 -i 0 /dev/sda1
tune2fs -c -1 -i 0 /dev/sda3
tune2fs -c -1 -i 0 /dev/sda4
12. Edit /etc/fstab
mkdir sda1
mount -t ext3 /dev/sda1 sda1
nano sda1/etc/fstab
/dev/md4 MUST BE REPLACED BY /dev/sda4!
Save it by pressing CTRL + X, Y, ENTER.
Or use any other editor you like… [Nano is quite simple]
umount sda1
DO NOT FORGET THIS!
13. poweroff the computer
Plug the drive back to MyBook and be happy its running again ;)
PLEASE READ
KNOWN PROBLEMS
- The lights go on, but MyBook do not listen on any network address
- The DATA partition does not mount automaticly
1) This problem is because of some coruption in the 3rd partition… Also MyBook shows to be connected only to 100 mbps on gigabit network.
HOW TO FIX —> FOLLOW STEP 10 of the manual above
2) This is because the 4th partition isn't recognized as md4 but as sda4…
HOW TO FIX —> FOLLOW STEP 12 of the manual above
DO NOT FORGET TO UMOUNT THE PARTITION CORRECTLY!
If you have another problem, start from scratch… This manual at its actual state is 100% OK
