Reveal File System of WD My Cloud

This page reveals the file system of the cloud HDD product, WD My Cloud. I poof that the product is just a mini PC with HDD where Linux installing. The page teaches us to use linux commands (df, fdisk, parted, mdadm) to reveal the secret.

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I suppose the product is a mini PC. To proof it, I create a file, aa.txt in /etc/samba.

  > echo aaa > aa.txt
  > shutdown -r now  

The aa.txt still exists after restarting. Therefore the rootfs is in HDD and the assumption is proofed.

Let's use df -ahT command to report file system. We make sure that sda4 is a partition in a HDD. We are interested in rootfs and /dev/root.

df

     -a     include dummy file systems

     -h     print size in human readable format

     -T     print file system type

The following commands show that the /dev/root is linked to a device named md1. So the next question is what/where is md1.

  > ls -al /dev/root                                    
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Aug 26 03:05 /dev/root -> md1
  > ls -al /dev/md1                                     
  brw-rw---T 1 root disk 9, 1 Aug 26 03:05 /dev/md1     

Please use fdisk -l to list partition tables. It appears that the HDD is parted as GPT.

Therefore we change to use parted -l to get more information of the partition tables on all block devices. It apears that ,sda1 and sda2 partitions are combined as RAID, and md1 is a RAID with 2048M bytes. We suppose that md1 is composed of sda1 and sda2 partitions.

We use mdadm --detail /dev/md1 to proof the assumption. The sda1 and sda2 partitions are combined as RAID named md1 where is rootfs.

We can use the following commands to get more information for each partition.

fdisk /dev/sda

fdisk /dev/sda1

fdisk /dev/sda2

fdisk /dev/sda3

fdisk /dev/sda4

How do we share a directory in Dropbox without moving it under Dlopbox directory?

There is a directory in your local computer. For example,

D:\Homework 

You want to share it in Dropbox but you don't want to move it under DropBox directory. For example,

C:\Users\Count_Chu\Dropbox

You want to keep the path. How do you do? I found a way to solve the problem. For Windows 7+, you can use mklink to make a symbolic link from your directory to the linked directory in Dropbox. For example,

mklink /D C:\Users\Count_Chu\Dropbox\Homework D:\Homework

Then please open Dropbox directory, you can find that the directory linked in Dropbox directory. For example,

Therefore your directory (e.g., Homework) is shared under Dropbox and you don't need to really move the path (e.g., D:\Homework). The directory will be automatically synchronized with Dropbox.

But there is a problem that the new files cannot be updated on Dropbox. To solve the it, you can move your directory into Dropbox directory and run mklink to make a symbolic link from your directory in Dropbox to the linked directory you moved. For example,

move D:\Homework C:\Users\Count_Chu\Dropbox\Homework     
mklink /D D:\Homework C:\Users\Count_Chu\Dropbox\Homework

-Count