PART 1 - Can I recover my files from my WD My Book Live NAS?

PART 1 - Can I recover my files from my WD My Book Live NAS? In this episode I explain what I intend to do and highlight that there is a recognised firmware vulnerability. So reconnecting it to my network may NOT be a good idea.
Quote:-
The My Book Live firmware is vulnerable to a remotely exploitable command injection vulnerability when the device has remote access enabled. This vulnerability may be exploited to run arbitrary commands with root privileges. Additionally, the My Book Live is vulnerable to an unauthenticated factory reset operation which allows an attacker to factory reset the device without authentication.
In PART 2 I use "iLike SD Card Data Recovery Version 9.0" to recover my files. I installed it in 2021 when I needed to recover some important files off an SD card. I don't know if it is intended to work with large external drives like this, but it does seem to work. However there are two downsides.
1. It is taking over 16 hours to scan the drive, (we are talking about a 2 terabyte drive), and then a similar amount of time to recover the files. To be fair, the docking station I am using is USB 2.0 not USB 3 so the file transfer speed is significantly limited.
2. When it recovers the files, they do not have the original file names, just numbers. The music files do have the meta data, such as artist and album.
Reference links
Important: WD My Book Live End of Support Notice!
WD My Book Live has reached its end of support life cycle.
WDC-21008 Recommended Security Measures for WD My Book Live and WD My Book Live Duo www.westerndigital.com/suppor...
HDD TVS diode FAQ community.wd.com/t/hdd-tvs-di...
My Book Live & My Book Live Duo: LED Behavior support-en.wd.com/app/answers...
Pin Reset and System Only Restore My Book Live & My Book Live Duo Instructions support-en.wd.com/app/answers...
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[@MsRaidman]

nice video. those old wd,s are hard to find nowadays since they dont make em anymore. might be lucky to find one used on ebay or somewhere..

[@HoratioChinn]

Just this week I tried to use an old WD MyBook Live Duo which is the same device but with two drives in a raid configuration. It powered on but couldn't get it to be recognised by my PC. The old interface used to look at the files wouldn't work. I saw the same message on their website about the vulnerability and they were now discontinued. I always found it to be incredibly slow transferring data hence why I didn't continue to use it. Just today I took both 3GB hard drives out and reformatted to just use as external drives. I had a few of the MyBook external hard drives, mostly with firewire connections to use with a Mac but useless nowadays, just having one left with a USB 3 connection which I need to see if it still works.

[@IanSlothieRolfe]

I did wonder if there was some software written to decrypt the hard drive, as I can't imagine you are the only person to have suffered this problem in the time this device has been around, but from reading the video description it seems you have found a solution. I used to have a program for Windows Ibefore I stopped using windows) that would rename MP3 and WMA files from the metadata on the files to make everything consistant, so it might be worth hunting one of them out - I think the one I used had a small licencing cost but I had about 18,000 files to deal with including removing the WMA copy protection and conversion to MP3 but there are other free programs out there,Unfortunately I can't remember what the software was called.

[@GrandadIsAnOldMan]

Yes, not sure why it worked, but I recovered all the files. However, in most cases, that did not include the file names, so I have the data, but will have fun identifying it. The music files do have the meta data, so they can be grouped by album and track. The old photos have the dates, and that is probably good enough as in most cases they would have had default file names.

[@theoztreecrasher2647]

"Having waffled on for about 6 minutes"......It was about there that I was starting to muse that if this old fellah needs to acquire a cheap catalytic convertor for his car I hope that he sub-contracts the job to the local sabre saw boys. 🤔😜😁

[@davidbolha]

I would just simply totally disassemble the NAS, remove the actual hard drive & connect it to either a desktop PC or a laptop (through a generic SATA2/3 - USB 3.0 external enclosure). Operating System-wise Ubuntu or like System Rescue CD linux live distribution would be more then adequate to access the files. 🤔🙄 But you could probably even get the EXT2/EXT3 driver for Windows so you could make the transfer easier like so. Because the data partition on these is a Linux-based partition type. So not a FAT32 or NTFS. 😉😎 I'm not sure how is it with data encryption on these WD products though. Because I do have experience with them (see my channel). But WD My Book Live is WAY better then their newer My Cloud products. Those go bad very often. Of course a Synology NAS is even better... 😕😊😒