My WD20000D033 → My Book World Edition II (blue rings) 2TB, 2 drives of 1 TB each in RAID 1 (mirror), unfotunately just died due to unstable power or overheating… It just flashes once blue and that’s all… I heard some tick tack noises and I was worryied for the hard drives.
After checking the power adapter tried with another one, and pushed front button and reset button several times (yes i held it down for a while), I’ve desided to open it up…
Now I have in hand the 2 1TB drives which i checked under windows only… both drives appear to work fine…
So what should I do know to see and get back my data? After all that was the reason why I bought the 2 drives model.
Secondly is there any other solution to completely recover the pcb? Any chance of exchanging it?
Western Digital would have to answer about the controller board. You might want to contact Support directly on that issue.
For the drives themselves, if you have them hooked up, but can’t see the partitions under Windows, then I suspect that they are partitioned/formatted under Linux. One option is to download and install DiskInternals Linux Reader-
I have tried to see the partitions from Ubuntu but still there is no specific file system and i didn’t want to do something and loose my data…
i can see the partitions but i can’t recognise them…
since the two drives were at raid 1 which is mirroring is it safe to assume that the partitions are identical and each one is independent of the other? or is there some weird file sytem before data were cloned?
edit: I tried it no luck it can see the partitions but not read them… but it says file system: Linux raid
Do I need both of them connected to read this FS?
If one of them was dead I still should read my data…
I’ve never been in this situation personally, but looking at it from a Linux environment is probably a good way to go. On the surface, I would have thought that a single drive from RAID 1 would hold all the data. The information you’re getting does make it seem that there’s interdependence between the drives. If you can, hooking them up together seems like a useful experiment to try.
You might try looking at them with Gparted, available here:
After searching a lot I have found a couple different ways to see my disks…
Connect both drives in two Sata slots then, install mdadm in a Linux distro if there isn’t already there as I did… and then tell mdadm to autodetect your raid arrays or you can do that manually if you wish…
Connect both drives in two Sata slots, then if you have already a Linux distro with mdadm installed it should find the drives during start up and automount them. It will ask you if you want to start the array in degraded mode if there is any problem in the array…
see mdadm man for options (assemble, manage, and misc are the most important in this case)
oh and some other useful commands for checking the drives, before you start…
sudo fdisk -l
cat /proc/mdstat
These two options are of course for any raid setup 0,1 …
If you have only one good drive of a raid 1 (mirroring) array then there is another way to see those files…
the partition you want to see is actually an ext3 partition but the filesystem label isn’t ext3 because it is part of a raid array and it is labeled as Raid or something similar…
You can however mount that partition forcing mount command to treat the partition as ext3, using (-t or --types) option and then ext3 or whatever…
That is the safest way i found to see a single raid partition in Linux…
Now I must find another HDD large enough to fit temporarily all my data in… grrr
Oh and gparted although is a fine tool to manage partitions shouldn’t be use if the disks are ok…
I tried to change the filesystem label from there and i ended up with a degraded array just because i changed the metadata on one drive…
Do not do anything to a raid array that apears to be OK but mount it as a raid array or as a single disk… Save your data nd then play
