#Use wd mybook for mac on windows how to

You’ll also need somewhere to put the recovered files – maybe another WD NAS? Maybe not 🙂

The trick to being able to mount the 64k sector disk is to avoid directly mounting it using the most excellent fuseext2 package.

In short you’re going to need to get the hard disk out of the NAS enclosure, stick it into a PC running a recent(ish) version of Linux and mount the partition using fuseext2. This is the biggest hurdle as your PC running linux will not be able to mount it!Ī rough understanding of Linux is useful. The hard disk ext4 partition (the one with all your data on) is formatted using 64kb sectors.The hard disk uses a (new) GTP partitioning scheme, older versions of Linux will struggle.The hard disk is big, USB enclosures hate that.I tried linux machines with custom built kernels. I tried various ext2/ext3 windows drivers. these have no chance as they all pretty much only support up to 2TB disks.

#Use wd mybook for mac on windows how to

Scouring google for tips on how to get your data back results in nothing useful. Normal means of recovering data from them don’t work. Unfortunately the way WD formats these NAS hard disks is very strange indeed. Anyway, the NAS was destroyed in a thunderstorm one day but fortunately the hard disk still worked. I have never kept anything *really* important on there as I didn’t have anything to back up all that data on to. When the WD Mybook Live 3TB NAS was released, I went out and bought one and promptly put all my stuff on it. Also, check the comments as a lot of other people have tips!

The procedure here may well not work for you, please just use it for ideas. This article was originally written in 2013 and applies to a fairly old model of the WD Mybook Live.