First of all.. THANK YOU ALL FOR THIS THREAD!!!! I was really pulling my hair out trying to save my drive, and this got me going the right direction!
second of all… $500 is a rediculous amount to pay to recover data from a perfectly good $149 drive… All nova1981 needed was correct instructions and he could easily do it himself. Western Digital My Book World Edditions have problems with their electronics, and it is VERY common for them to stop booting correctly, making your data completly inaccessible even though there is absolutly nothing wrong with your actual hard drive. This has happened to 3 out of 3 of the mbwe's that I have owned. Fortunatly the solution is way simpler than everyone is making it out to be, and from reading the entire thread, it seems that what is needed is for someone to explain the procedure in a way that someone who has never seen linux can understand.
I also got the fatal error when trying to run the command Sudo modprobe md but after actually looking up the command.. I discovered that this is only to install the modules into your operating system.. and this is completly un-nessecary on modern linux installations, because the modules needed are already there, and the error is caused because modprobe is NOT there…. but you don't need it.. so just skip that.
another thing everone seems to be not mentioning, is that you need to be a super-user or root-user to do the actual mount, or you just get an error. You all have to realize.. most people are reading this page because their Western Digital My Wold Book Edition NAS has failed and they are desperatly trying to recover their data from the perfectly good drive inside.. Most, like myself have never messed with linux, and it never even occurs to them that linux is CASE SENSITIVE… so you must type commands exactly.
Here is how I was able to recover 100% of my data from my failed My World Book Edition NAS.
1. Download a Linux operating system. I used Zorin http://zorin-os.webs.com use this link to download http://s5.histats.com/stats/r.php?715549&100&5501&urlr=&ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/zorin/3/zorin-os-3-core-64.iso You can use other flavors of linux, but one based on ubuntu would probably make the instructions easier to follow. My reason for picking zorin was that there were only 3 download choices, while some others had tons and tons, and it was very confusing what I would need to get the job done… that, and well it does look cool! I may keep it around and play with it.
2. Burn the image to a DVD (not a CD, it won't fit) I could't get my dvd software to work so I downloaded the free trial program at http://www.nch.com.au/burn/burnsetup.exe it worked perfectly fine and was very easy to use. I just selected the option to write image to DVD and selected the image file I downloaded, and away it went.
3. Remove the hard drive from the My Book World Editon device I found a video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FlySnyJ0CQ there are lots of other sites that tell you how to get the case open, including this one.
install the drive in your computer on one of the SATA ports.. It would be a good idea to have a second drive also installed large enough to hold your data on another port. I installed a 1.5TB drive on one port and the 1TB drive from the failed My World Book Edition NAS on the another port, and of course the DVD drive needs to be plugged in as well. if you don't have enough sata cable you could install linux on the new drive, then remove the dvd drive and use that port for the other drive… some of your prompts will be slightly different, but other than that everything should work fine.
4. Boot the computer off the DVD. You do not need to install the new operating system, you can do everything you need to do running right off the DVD.
5. When it boots from dvd you should get a menu, choose the option to start the Live DVD This will start up the operating system.
6. once you are in, open the terminal program. You can find it by pressing the button in the lower left corner (similar to the windows start button) then going to Accessories then Terminal This will start something like a command prompt. but the prompt will be something like
live@live: -$
the $ is part of the prompt, you don't type the $ in the commands
7. You need to figure out which drive is which, type the following command and read the report
sudo fdisk -l
NOTE.. that is a LOWER CASE L in the above line… yea it's hard to tell what it is.
this will list the drives and their partitions. You will see something like:
device boot start end blocks id system
/dev/sda1 * 1 182402 1465137695+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
This is telling me my drive at loaction /dev/sda1 is a HPFS/NTFS drive.. one that I formatted on Windows XP pro.
device boot start end blocks id system
/dev/sdb1 4 369 2939895 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdb2 370 382 104422+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdb3 383 505 987997+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdb4 506 121601 972703620 fd Linux raid autodetect
This is what a My World Book Edition 1TB hard drive looks like. /dev/sdb4 is the partition we want to mount, you can see by it's huge size, it's where our data is all at. I will use /dev/sdb4 in my example, but you will have to subsitute wherever your drive is.
8. To mount the drive, we must be a root-user or super-user, so type the following command:
sudo su
the prompt will change from something like live@live:-$ to root@live:/home/live#
9. now create the directory to work with. Type the following:
mkdir /media/xyz
this reponse to this should be to just get a new prompt.
10. now to mount the drive. Type the following command:
mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb4 /media/xyz
don't forget to replace /dev/sdb4 with whatever your drive partition was.
This should mount the drive and you should notice a new hard drive icon suddenly appears on your desktop named xyz if you open it, there are all your files! If you don't see it on your desktop, there should be a new drive in your computer browser named xyz. now all you need to do is copy the entire drive to your other drive and you have recovered everything! when you are done you can just re-format the drive to something more useful and use it however you wish.. will probably work fine for many years to come as there was nothing ever wrong with the drive itself.
I did not need to do anything further than this.. I just highlighted everything and copied it, then selected my new drive and pasted it in there.. about 9 hours later, it was finished and I had a drive useable in my windows xp computer directly with all my data.
I did not set up any permissions or passwords on my drive, but if you did, I believe you would still need to use the command:
sudo chmod -R 777 /media/xyz
since I did not have any set, I have no way to test that though.
Good luck to everyone!