Hello, I'm new here and hope I'm doing right.

I have a problem with my external WD My Passport Essential 1TB (about 3-4 years old). When I bought it I was living with a problematic guy and wanted to protect my data. So I took easiest way and used the provided WD SmartWare Software to set a password.
Now and there the HDD had minor issues, was not detected properly etc. But after wiggling the USB cable around a bit or sometimes - please don't kill me, I know it was a mistake - shaking the HDD smoothly, everything was fine. Sometimes more sometimes less time was needed but in the end it worked.
But since a few days I have bigger problems. When I connect the HDD it seems working fine. The HDD starts rotating and I get the Window and enter my password. Then the autoplay for my drive should open. But instead almost everything on the computer freezes. The drive appears as not-initialized drive in the Disk Management which also freezes after I enter my password. In the Windows explorer it only appears as local drive but does not show the name I gave it.

I tried several times. Also on Ubuntu Mint Live version which helped me a lot in the past. But either the HDD has serios problems or Linux is not compatible with WD SmartWare. On another Windows PC I had the same problems as I have on my computer. I also tried the newest (free) version but didn't help.

Any ideas what I can do?
Since the drive is rotating, LED is flashing and no aweful noises are recognizable I still hope I can at least save my data anyhow.

I have already opened the case and recognized two pins on one side of the usb port and 12 pins on the other side. Any idea what the purpose of those could be?

ps: English is not my first language. If I wasn't clear enough, please ask.

There's no pins there that are a SATA port if that's what you are thinking. A couple of those 12 pins are a terminal connection, but that's really only useful for reading and writing the PCB ROM code (not your problem). There's no pins there that would enable you to read the data in any event.

Most likely your drive has either the WD slow responding firmware bug or just a large patch of bad sectors in the lower LBA regions. Possibly, but less likely, the issue is a single failed read/write head. If your data is at all important and not worth putting at risk, I'd recommend you seek professional recovery. At this point, the cost may only be $300-500 USD.

If you're unwilling to pay that much and are insistent on doing it yourself, be prepared for a steep learning experience. You'll need to replace the HDD PCB with a matched SATA one, along with transferring the 8 pin U12 ROM chip. Then image the data using a Linux tool onto another drive. Then you'll need to use some specialized software to decrypt the data (which I don't think will even work yet given that you've set a user password, possibly soon they'll update that). Also, you should beware that all of this poses a high risk of permanent data loss if anything is done wrong.

Most people give up long before completing this process and end up opting for pro recovery in the end. Others end up with a much more expensive recovery (sometimes thousands more), or just end up losing their data due to something going wrong. I'm not saying this to scare you, I know you won't be shipping the drive overseas to us here anyway. I just want to give you the reality of the complexity and complications of working on these. With pro tools like PC-3000 it's much easier to handle this task, but that's a tool that's out of the price range of anyone not doing professional recovery.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Thank you very much for you quick and clear answer.

The more time is passing by the more important data I remember which was (hopefully is) stored there and I'm thinking of giving this into expert's hands. I already found a company where at least a first estimation of the damage is for free.

But for now, is there any option to find out what could have happened? Maybe some kind of analyze software?

And what I was wondering the whole time is why it seems there is no possibility to do anything on Linux. I'm using Linux a bit but I'm not that familiar. I was facing the situation that I saw both volumes one for unlocking and my data drive. The one for unlocking I wasn't able to open because "it was already mounted" and my data I couldn't open because "it was not mounted". Via Terminal I was able to go into the first one and down to the unlocker.exe. But I already heard before that Linux does not support *.exe files. Does that mean that the SmartWare software of WD is not supported for Linux at all? Or is there maybe another possibility to get access on Linux?

Does the drive report its SMART data (probably not)? You could try smartmontools or CrystalDiskInfo. If you can access SMART, then there may be a way to apply the "slow fix" via USB using HDDSuperTool.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

If you're willing to ship to England, we can help for a reasonable cost

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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