Restoring old Iomega HMDHD Network Drive after disk failure
I have an old 2 TByte single-internal-disk + USB Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive from 2012 (a mini NAS) that I still use to serve music and movies at home. It just had a hard drive failure, and I discovered that this model stores all its firmware on the internal hard drive, and without it has no ability to do anything, including initialize a new drive. The CDROM that came with it has no recovery utility, and Iomega's support web site is long gone, as is the [NAS-Central.org](http://NAS-Central.org) site that backed up some of their files. There is some information and some firmware files scattered around the internet, but almost all for the HMNHD-CE (Cloud Edition) model that came along a year later and is incompatible.
In the end I was able to format a new drive and get the unit working again with the aid of two sites that had the right stuff for my old model HMNHD (not -CE):
[https://bad3000.blogspot.com/2014/01/replace-internal-sata-drive-or.html?m=0](https://bad3000.blogspot.com/2014/01/replace-internal-sata-drive-or.html?m=0) – gives correct detailed instructions for initializing the new drive partition layout, but has no firmware files (partly Spanish, but mostly English)
[https://web.archive.org/web/20180817010758/http://downloads.iomega.nas-central.org/Users/Mijzelf/HMNHD/partitions.2.064/](https://web.archive.org/web/20180817010758/http:/downloads.iomega.nas-central.org/Users/Mijzelf/HMNHD/partitions.2.064/) \- has the required firmware files [mbr+uboot+kernel.gz](https://web.archive.org/web/20180817010758/http:/downloads.iomega.nas-central.org/Users/Mijzelf/HMNHD/partitions.2.064/mbr+uboot+kernel.gz) and [sda1-2064.tgz](https://web.archive.org/web/20180817010758/http:/downloads.iomega.nas-central.org/Users/Mijzelf/HMNHD/partitions.2.064/sda1-2064.tgz) (backup of old NAS-Central files)
Posted here in case anyone else is ever trying to figure this out and getting stuck on incompatible instructions or files meant for the -CE version.
No need to comment on how old hardware should be thrown out and it's not worthwhile waste time repairing it. Personal choice. :)