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Moving a WD MyCloud harddisk into a pc
written:
5 years ago
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Programming
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I just successfully moved the 3T WD Red harddisk (wdbctl0030hwt) out of its chassis, into my Intel/Windows 10 tower. Altough that's not what WD recommends, and I'm sure I lost any warranty with it, it's good to know there is a way to do that. E.g. in case the network controller or the power connector is broken, or whatever.
So, how to do that?
- First thing: open the chassis, without breaking it. This 2 minute video explains it better than I can write down here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_eW25LGXcI
- Then, plug off the controller, and remove the screws from the internal harddisk
- Plug the harddisk with a SATA cable to your PC
- Boot your PC, and you will see a handful of partitions on that harddisk, but you cannot access them. This is because it's formatted with EXT4 filesystem, for which you need a Windows driver first. Get Ext2Fsd from https://www.ext2fsd.com/
- Now you should see one partition on that disk which consists of most of the available space. You should be able to read from it using your Windows Explorer or any other program.
- I highly recommend not to attempt to write files onto that partition. The driver disables write access by default, but in case it's activated - don't try.
- Use the current state to backup your data to some other harddisk, if you haven't done so
- Afterwards, I removed that Ext2Fsd driver again, rebooted the PC and deleted all partitions on the harddisk. Then created one fresh NTFS volume on it, which I am now using as a storage extension for my tiny SSD.
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