De-attach WD Drive#

  • You will have to open your WD MyCloud device and remove the HDD or drive inside it.
  • Attach the drive to your computer.
  • If you don’t have a Linux based OS installed on your computer, you can boot your computer through a live USB. See how to create one at ubuntu.com

Create Partitions#

You can skip this section if you have not formatted the drive after connecting it to your computer and have the original partitions.

  • Install need software
apt-get install parted
  • Find your WD drive on your computer, look at the partition sizes and find the one that has a similar size as your WD MyCloud. For me, it was /dev/sdb with a size around 1.8 TB.
fdisk -l
  • Run the utility on your WD drive
parted /dev/sdb
  • Print all partitions on the drive
print
  • Remove all the partitions. For me, there was only one partition
remove 1
  • Recreate all needed partitions
mklabel gpt
mkpart primary 528M 2576M
mkpart primary 2576M 4624M
mkpart primary 16M 528M
mkpart primary 4828M 100%
mkpart primary 4624M 4724M
mkpart primary 4724M 4824M
mkpart primary 4824M 4826M
mkpart primary 4826M 4828M
set 1 raid on
set 2 raid on
  • Quit the utility
quit
  • Format data and swap partitions
mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdb4
mkswap /dev/sdb3
  • Create RAID partitions
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --metadata=0.9 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb2

Install Debian#

  • Find your WD drive on your computer, look at the partition sizes and find the one that has a similar size as your WD MyCloud. For me, it was /dev/sdb with a size of around 1.8 TB.
fdisk -l
  • Install software for RAID devices
apt-get install mdadm
  • Mount RAID partitions
mdadm --stop /dev/md*
mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdb2
  • Mount data partitions
mount -t ext4 /dev/sdb4 /mnt
cd /mnt
  • Download the Clean Debian package and extract it
wget https://github.com/abskmj/wd-mycloud-gen1/releases/download/packages/clean-debian-jessie.tgz

tar -xvfz clean-debian-jessie.tgz

If you are planning to install one of the original packages. You can download that package instead of Debian.

# v3.x
wget https://github.com/abskmj/wd-mycloud-gen1/releases/download/packages/original-v03.04.01-230.tar.gz

tar -xvfz original-v03.04.01-230.tar.gz

# v4.x
wget https://github.com/abskmj/wd-mycloud-gen1/releases/download/packages/original-v04.01.02-417.tar.gz

tar -xvfz original-v04.01.02-417.tar.gz
  • Copy images to partitions
dd if=kernel.img of=/dev/sdb5
dd if=kernel.img of=/dev/sdb6
dd if=config.img of=/dev/sdb7
dd if=config.img of=/dev/sdb8
dd if=rootfs.img of=/dev/md0

Re-attach WD Drive#

  • You can shut your computer down and remove the WD drive.

  • You don’t have to assemble the device completely right now, you can simply connect the plate to the drive and attach a LAN / power cord to it.

  • It should start up and show a yellow light.

  • You should see a green light in a while, which means Debian has started properly.

  • You can now ssh into your MyCloud device.

ssh root@192.168.X.XXX # replace with your IP

  • The default password for the root user is mycloud.

  • DO WHATEVER YOU WANT WITH YOUR NEW LINUX BOX! : )

WARNING: Executing apt-get upgrade sometimes bricks the device and should avoid it.

What’s Next?#

References#