My Book 1tb - Unable to read data

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

So my laptop HDD crashed recently, no problem, I have a very recent backup on the My Book.

I go an grab it and find that there is a hole where the mini USB adapter should be. The USB adapter snapped off its board in the drive enclosure.

No problem, I have a SATA drive caddy and the drive is unlocked. I plug it all in, the WD drive shows up in Windows 7 device manager, however Windows complains that the drive is not initialized. It will not obtain a drive letter and when it eventually does, Windows complains that it isn’t formatted.

I run R-Studio on it to try and recover files, the scan takes over 8 hours and produces a view that show the WD partition for software but all of the recognized files are useless and text files even show content like the following

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Any ideas on how I can get any of this data back? 

Much appreciated!

2

The board that the USB port was attached to provides hardware encryption. About the only hope is see if you can get a new port soldered on. WD does not sell replacements. You can try finding another board on Ebay or from a similar drive. That may work it’s not guaranteed. Sorry I can’t be more helpful. Look through the posts by fzabkar he explained a bit about the board numbers.

Joe

1 Like
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Thanks for the note. I had not set encryption on my drive, but are you stating that it would be there anyway?

So I bought another caddy, same model (but has upgraded USB port).

I replaced my old drive with the data I want, into the caddy and connected it. Windows and Linux both show that the drive is RAW and no files exist.

With this in mind, should I run a full data recovery tool/suite on the drive or send the My Book USB caddy/unit to a recovery services company? With that encryption chip, does it differ between caddies for uniqueness?

What data recovery software would people recommend if I was to try myself? I downloaded a few products, but they all find junk file data like above