My book essential and internal disk with another enclosure

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

Simple question: is it possible to connect the internal disk of a mybook essential (Model: WDBAAF0020HBK ) external hard drive to a standard SATA to USB2 enclosure or even simply with sata?

I tried and in fact firstly it said :

“unknown partition table” :

May 12 20:23:40 localhost kernel: USB Mass Storage support registered.
May 12 20:23:45 localhost kernel: scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access     WDC WD20 EADS-11R6B1      0A80 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
May 12 20:23:45 localhost kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
May 12 20:23:45 localhost kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: [sdd] 3907029168 512-byte logical blocks: (2.00 TB/1.81 TiB)
May 12 20:23:45 localhost kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
May 12 20:23:45 localhost kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
May 12 20:23:45 localhost kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
May 12 20:23:45 localhost kernel: sdd: unknown partition table
May 12 20:23:45 localhost kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
May 12 20:23:45 localhost kernel: sd 2:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk

… then after having updating firmware and WD smartware software for hidding the vcd it said:

scsi16 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
May 13 06:01:03 localhost kernel: scsi 16:0:0:0: Direct-Access                                    PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
May 13 06:01:03 localhost kernel: sd 16:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
May 13 06:01:03 localhost kernel: sd 16:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk

and i could not even access /dev/sdd … :confused:

why the hell is this? are you guys encrypting every sector of the hard drive??

Are you in order to make the vcd unerasable, translating the partition table to another sector so that sectors before this one are reserved for the vcd??

Would this mean that the internal hard drive can’t be read without its original SATA to USB2 interface card ? What does this interface card do exactly?? Does it perform any sort of translation of sectors?

If it does, what should i do in order to have access to the internal drive??

Cheers

2

The drive uses transparent encryption, which means it encrypts the data even if not supplying a password in SmartWare. The key is stored on the external USB-SATA PCB board, which contains an IC (Initio chip one some) for handling the enc/dec process.

You can try to swap the drive with another similar box and see if you can see the data. If you do, then the data is not encrypted but transformed. If you don’t, then it is encrypted. There is a usb bypass procedure where you connect directly to some pins on the hard drive pcb, so you dont need the external PCB. In this case, you will only see the data if it is transformed and not encrypted. Whether you set a password in smartware or not, the first thing you should do is to put the drive in an identical new external box.

You should send your drive to a data recovery company and never attempt to fix these drives yourself.

Please read and understand these topics:

http://www.forensicfocus.com/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=6539585

http://forum.hddguru.com/new-external-drive-problems-t14667.html

http://forum.hddguru.com/wd10tmvv-t16204.html

http://forum.hddguru.com/essential-stopped-working-after-firmware-upgrade-t16866.html#p112580