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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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WD My Cloud Home - Encrypted Files?

August 10th, 2019, 7:09

I have a 6tb 'My Cloud Home' that has stopped being detected as a network drive.

I have removed the drive from its enclosure and connected by SATA, SMART shows no bad sectors and will scan at 175mb/s a second so I'm confident the drive itself is fine. In Windows it brings up about 20 drive letters all saying the volume needs formatting, up to letter Z. I'm not sure if it would keep going if it had more letters to assign, but it stops at Z. I've scanned the main 5.4tb partition in various data recovery programs, and it can access the ext4 file system without any issues and displays the files and folders, but there is no user data within the files.

I have also connected it up in Ubuntu and it mounts the main ext4 partition without any issue, showing the same files and folders as displayed by the data recovery programs in Windows.

So it seems that somehow the enclosure PCB is encrypting the files but not the file system. Has anyone encountered this before, and know a way around it? The enclosure PCB has a network port for connectivity only, it also has USB type A but I understand that can't be used to access the drive directly.

I'm guessing the source problem is either a fault with the enclosure PCB, or some sort of corruption within the partition table or one of the other partitions necessary for it to work properly but that isn't the main data partition.

Re: WD My Cloud Home - Encrypted Files?

August 11th, 2019, 4:22

Are these resources are of any help?

https://anionix.ddns.net/WDMyCloud/

FWIW, here are the Tx/Rx connections for a My Cloud Gen 1:

https://sjc1.discourse-cdn.com/wd/uploads/default/original/3X/b/3/b35cc75cc7365d7c01d2ed579308291de0a053a1.jpg

Perhaps you could gain access to the OS via a UART port and use dd to clone the decrypted drive to a USB mass storage device?


Edit: Photos of My Cloud Home

https://forum.hddguru.com/download/file.php?id=18370&mode=view (comp)
https://forum.hddguru.com/download/file.php?id=18371&mode=view (bot)

J2 appears to be the UART header.

Re: WD My Cloud Home - Encrypted Files?

August 11th, 2019, 4:49

I swapped out the enclosure PCB from another My Cloud Home and I was able to login through the browser, I could see all files for a short time, then the drive power dropped out for some reason and it went offline. When I repowered it, it now says "Content Migration - your data is being migrated and the device will return to normal operation in a few mintues". There's no progress bar or any more information on what the hell its doing, and no access to the data.

I've looked online and it seems like lots of people have encountered this Migrating Data problem, some users report it taking up to 5 days before it returns to normal operation. Hopefully it returns to normal and I can copy the data off. This is an unbelievably bad product from WD, I would strongly against anyone buying one.

Thanks fzabkar I'll check those links.

Re: WD My Cloud Home - Encrypted Files?

August 11th, 2019, 19:28

jordash wrote:In Windows it brings up about 20 drive letters all saying the volume needs formatting, up to letter Z. I'm not sure if it would keep going if it had more letters to assign, but it stops at Z.

https://anionix.ddns.net/WDMyCloud/WDMyCloud-Home/Original/Disk_image_table_for_AIO_2TB.txt

Re: WD My Cloud Home - Encrypted Files?

August 12th, 2019, 3:41

It finished migrating after a few hours and gave back access to the files. They didn't make it easy to work out how to download all the data off the drive, but eventually I managed to map a network place to get it to work, then I could just copy everything onto an external drive. There was no way to select and copy all data through the standard interface using the browser, I would have thought they'd put more of a focus on making it easy to back up the data. I suspect there's going to be alot of unhappy customers with this product when things start to go wrong.

Re: WD My Cloud Home - Encrypted Files?

August 12th, 2019, 9:37

User data is in there , it is simply stores as sqlite databases.

Re: WD My Cloud Home - Encrypted Files?

August 13th, 2019, 0:57

Is there a way to unpack them?

Re: WD My Cloud Home - Encrypted Files?

August 13th, 2019, 12:09

jordash wrote:Is there a way to unpack them?

Yes, there is commercial aplication: UFS explorer Pro, it does the trick. But i am not sure is this option in recently released version or not.

Re: WD My Cloud Home - Encrypted Files?

August 13th, 2019, 12:50

DR-Kiev wrote:
jordash wrote:Is there a way to unpack them?

Yes, there is commercial aplication: UFS explorer Pro, it does the trick. But i am not sure is this option in recently released version or not.


Have not seen that in any release notes for UFS explorer Pro, but a nice feature :)

Re: WD My Cloud Home - Encrypted Files?

August 13th, 2019, 13:58

digisupport wrote:
DR-Kiev wrote:
jordash wrote:Is there a way to unpack them?

Yes, there is commercial aplication: UFS explorer Pro, it does the trick. But i am not sure is this option in recently released version or not.


Have not seen that in any release notes for UFS explorer Pro, but a nice feature :)


Sir ,
You should have written like this " Have not seen that in any release notes for UFS explorer Pro, but a nice feature :) . " ,You actually missed a full stop after the sentence ,This is wrong grammar .

PS : Might be you start liking title case sentences if i correct you a few times .
@ Frank : Very good links you shared boss , Thank you .

Re: WD My Cloud Home - Encrypted Files?

August 13th, 2019, 14:35

Amarbir[CDR-Labs] wrote:
digisupport wrote:
DR-Kiev wrote:
jordash wrote:Is there a way to unpack them?

Yes, there is commercial aplication: UFS explorer Pro, it does the trick. But i am not sure is this option in recently released version or not.


Have not seen that in any release notes for UFS explorer Pro, but a nice feature :)


Sir ,
You should have written like this " Have not seen that in any release notes for UFS explorer Pro, but a nice feature :) . " ,You actually missed a full stop after the sentence ,This is wrong grammar .

PS : Might be you start liking title case sentences if i correct you a few times .
@ Frank : Very good links you shared boss , Thank you .


sORRY sir, tHANK yOU sir :wink:

Re: WD My Cloud Home - Encrypted Files?

August 14th, 2019, 3:56

digisupport wrote:
DR-Kiev wrote:
jordash wrote:Is there a way to unpack them?

Yes, there is commercial aplication: UFS explorer Pro, it does the trick. But i am not sure is this option in recently released version or not.


Have not seen that in any release notes for UFS explorer Pro, but a nice feature :)

It is in beta-version already, should be released withing next week.
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