Hi guys, this one's stumping me a bit.

Got a hard that that shows 'Not initialised' in disk manager

It does seem to take a little longer than usual to be detected (maybe 15-20 seconds) but otherwise spins up fine and is detected in SMART with 'good' health

I've run scans in R-Studio and and DMDE and they both pick up a small ~4MB 'WD Unlocker' partition at the end of the drive (and some files - I'll have to upload a photo later), however using hex viewer I can see data throughout the rest of the drive

Apparently it was formatted to NTFS, with no encryption, and last used in a Sabrent docking station, so not sure if the 'unlocker' partition has any relevance?

I'd say that the drive was shucked from a My Book enclosure and then repartitioned and formatted either in the dock or inside a computer. You are now seeing the unencrypted "SmartWare" stuff. This area (~32MB) is normally hidden from the host by the My Book bridge, but is now exposed by the Sabrent bridge.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

That was my thinking. Any ideas on recovering the actual data? As I say, I can see it throughout the drive in hex viewer, but the scans only detect the WD partition/files at the end.

Where's the bridge board ? Depends on the order of operations - might be worth checking with ufs explorer too.

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Data Recovery Services in the UK.
https://www.usbrecovery.co.uk/

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A backup a day keeps DR away.