Did I just brick my device?

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
1

Hello,

I have tampered with my device (My Cloud single bay) a bit recently and I’m worried that I might have broken it.

CURRENT STATUS: white LED, not blinking. Web interface loads and there is nice dashboard with correct data, but shows an overlay “Initializing device”. This has been for a few days now.

HOW DID IT HAPPEN:
I wanted to install a piece of software in a certain version on the device. I ssh’d to My Cloud and started playing with apt-get. Long story short, I’ve edited sources.list in order to get Debian unstable packages and apt tried to upgrade dpkg (it also removed FTP server). Upgrading dpkg did not succeed, it returned some error. At this point I gave up on installing the software I wanted; I decided I must clean up. So I downloaded newest firmware and loaded it into device. Since then:

  • I cannot ssh into device
  • I can’t access any shares
  • device does not show blue LED, it’s always yellow-ish white, blinking or not (mostly not).

How can I rescue my data? Is my device a brick, or can I somehow recover? I’ve tried the 40 second reset, but I think it doesn’t work (my non-admin user is still active).

Thanks in advance for all answers!

Best regards,
Paweł

2

Don’t need to read any further. Yes you may have bricked your device because these My Cloud units, especially the first generation v4.x single bay My Cloud units DO NOT use standard Linux. It uses a custom version and performing an apt-get can brick or otherwise cause issues.

You can remove the My Cloud hard drive from it’s enclosure and attach it to another PC using either a USB SATA hard drive enclosure or to a spare SATA port on a desktop PC. Then use Linux (or Linux boot disc/Live CD) to access the My Cloud drive. From there you can recover/copy off the user files.

Do a forum search, using the magnifying glass icon upper right, for “apt-get” and you’ll see this has been well discussed with suggestions on how to proceed to unbrick the My Cloud drive. Or do a forum search for “unbrick” for various directions to unbrick the My Cloud and reinstall the firmware and partitions.

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