I have a 3TB WD Red (WD30EFR, NASware 2.0) from a WD MyCloud that I am trying to recover. The MyCloud failed on me a while ago when I was trying to scp files to it and it apparently hit an endless loop of symlinks that eventually surpassed the capacity of the drive; it never booted again after that.
I have pulled the drive out and am using the USB adapter from a WD MyBook 3TB to attempt to read the drive. TestDisk sees the capacity correctly (3TB) but does not see any partitions on it. I am attempting to read it on a laptop using Kubuntu 19.04, 64Bit. I've been trying to get TestDisk to find the partitions but all I get are read errors. I noticed that if I tell TestDisk that the partition table is "GPT" or "None", it takes a very very long time (lucky to get to 10% completion in 24 hours) while "Intel" completes very quickly (completed overnight).
I also saw a recommendation to set the partition table to "none" and then attempt to get TestDisk to create an image. When I did this the image created was ~5GB. From my recollection (and searching online) it seems that MyCloud drives usually have ~5GB of partitioned space (essentially for the Linux-based OS) before the storage partition itself. I've read that the storage partition should be ext4.
My goal here is to try to get the data from the ext4 partition onto another drive. I have a brand new 8TB drive waiting for the data to come over. I just need to be able to mount the partition (one way or another) to do so, but I don't have a valid partition table.
It has also been suggested that these might use 64kb blocks; I can't find a way to set TestDisk for that in Ubuntu.
Any suggestions would be great! I'm starting to think I may need to send this drive to ontrack for recovery, but if I could do it myself that would be nice.
WD Red 3TB lost partition table
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When asking for technical support:
- Search for posts on the same topic before posting a new question.
- Give clear, specific information in the title of your post.
- Include as many details as you can, MOST POSTS WILL GET ONLY ONE OR TWO ANSWERS.
- Post a follow up with a "Thank you" or "This worked!"
- When you learn something, use that knowledge to HELP ANOTHER USER LATER.
Before posting, please read https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
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cgrenier
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Re: WD Red 3TB lost partition table
Please use ddrescue to clone the disk to a new empty one (3 TB or +) as described in https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
Once it's done, remove the original disk and try to recover the partition from the clone.
Once it's done, remove the original disk and try to recover the partition from the clone.