Unbricking and Recovering A Western Digital My Book Live World Edition

How to Recover, Rebuild and Unbrick Your Western Digital My Book Live

When you Mybook live is just showing red light in front, or the world edition shows just some steady white lights in front, you know it's really bad.  You can open it up, find the J8 solder pads on the board, and then solder on some header pins.  Connect those pins to a Prolific USB to Serial port converter. Just connect Grnd, URX and UTX, and then start it up.

The Live edition has an onboard JTAG and UART port. Until now I don't know the pinout of the JTAG so be warned to overwrite data in the NAND.
The Pinout of the UART Port "J8" is as follows: (your J8 port may not look like this at all, but it may just look like a 2x2 pin pad with a white square around it.
Pin 1 = +3.3V
Pin 2 = URX
Pin 3 = UTX
Pin 4 = GND
Warning: do not connect directly to a serial Port, you will need a ttl level shifter like the "Max233" or "FT232R". Otherwise you risk to break the hardware.
wd_mybook_live_UART.jpg
The UART Port will give you access to the console and during the booting to U-boot.
You will be able to change U-boot parameters, this will allow you to boot anything you want.
I would recommand that you backup the parameters before playing arround.
Baudrate is configured to: 115200
http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/wd-mybook-live-uart

Some Sample Output:
Initialising disks
No FIS received from device 1
No FIS received from device 1
Detecting SATA busses:
Bus 0: Found first device OK
  Device 0: Model: WDC WD10EADS-00L5B1  Firm: 01.01A01 Ser#: WD-WCAU4D836920
            Type: Hard Disk
            Supports 48-bit addressing
            Capacity: 953869.7 MB = 931.5 GB (1953525168 x 512)
  Device 1: not available
Environment successfully read from disk 0 primary image

U-Boot 1.1.2 (Oct  2 2008 - 12:51:43)

U-Boot code: 48D00000 -> 48D1B228  BSS: -> 48D1F040
## Unknown FLASH on Bank 0 - Size = 0x00000000 = 0 MB
Flash:  0 kB
In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
WD 1NC Board

IDE read: device 0 block # 255, count 1 ... 1 blocks read: OK

Recovery mode selected
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0

IDE device 0: Model: WDC WD10EADS-00L5B1  Firm: 01.01A01 Ser#: WD-WCAU4D836920
            Type: Hard Disk
            Supports 48-bit addressing
            Capacity: 953869.7 MB = 931.5 GB (1953525168 x 512)
... is now current device

IDE read: device 0 block # 300, count 5700 ... 5700 blocks read: OK
## Booting image at 48500000 ...
   Image Name:   Linux-2.6.24.4
   Image Type:   ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed)
   Data Size:    1593324 Bytes =  1.5 MB
   Load Address: 48008000
   Entry Point:  48008000
   Verifying Checksum ... OK
OK

Starting kernel ...

Uncompressing Linux.............................................................                                                  ....................................... done, booting the kernel.
Linux version 2.6.24.4 (brian@dualla) (gcc version 4.2.4) #1 Tue Feb 10 11:00:22                                                   GMT 2009
...
raid1: raid set md125 active with 1 out of 2 mirrors
raid1 not hw raidable, needs two working disks.
md: ... autorun DONE.
EXT3-fs: unable to read superblock
EXT2-fs: unable to read superblock
FAT: unable to read boot sector
VFS: Cannot open root device "md0" or unknown-block(9,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
0800  976762584 sda driver: sd
  0801    1959930 sda1
  0802     257040 sda2
  0803     987997 sda3
  0804  973522935 sda4
097c  973522816 md124 (driver?)
097f     987904 md127 (driver?)
097e     256960 md126 (driver?)
097d    1959808 md125 (driver?)
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(9,0)

The above console output shows why it's now a brick and is completely bricked.  



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